


bride of ice

by pathofcomets



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Rewrite, Character Study, Civil War, Companions, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, Family Issues, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Gen, House Trevelyan - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Mental Anguish, Mental Instability, Nobility, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, Rating May Change, Relationship Study, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Saving the World, Team as Family, Trevelyan (Dragon Age) has Sibling(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23533642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pathofcomets/pseuds/pathofcomets
Summary: Bull smiles at this uncertain, poor woman in front of him, torn apart already by the expectations that her people put on her – and he is trying to calculate for how long is the Inquisition supposed to last like this. Whatever the humans call her, she is nothing but a terrified and overworked noble, who blushes prettily at the simple mentions of his preferences in redheads, who stares after the Chargers with something like jealousy on her face.(OR, the growth of Lady Trevelyan, Herald of Andraste, Inquisitor).
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Iron Bull, Iron Bull & Female Trevelyan, Iron Bull/Female Trevelyan
Comments: 13
Kudos: 13





	1. history

**Author's Note:**

> hello, it is i, back at it with my dragon age bullshit. it's been.... a year, and i am still very much hooked on the story-line of Trevelyan, so as i replay the game, i want to do a more in-depth writing of it. i hope you'll join me on this journey, and enjoy reading as much as i enjoy writing.

She was born on a holy day, her mother’s birth-giving pain’s screams mingled with the joyous ringing of the bells from the Chantry. That’s how her mother knew, as her desperate wish has been, that this one last, late child will be a girl. Or at least that is the story that her mother says when she feels particularly fond over the fact that there’s only one of her children left in her house, or to nobles visiting hoping for the young lady’s hand in marriage, or when she wants something from her sole daughter and has to preface her request with emotional manipulation.

The young Trevelyan looks out the window of her carriage, frowning, knowing exactly what her mother wants from her this time before she even has to voice it.

“You cannot, mother.”

“Of course I can,” her mother smiles back at her. “I am your mother and I am your lady and I am sending you on a trip with your brother, not to marriage against your will.”

It is a bait, and a reminder of all that her mother has already done for her: postponing her marriage for this long already, despite the disagreement from other nobles and her own husband, asking in return just from some obedience when she outright needed it. Like right now.

It was the Conclave after all, and an important meeting for her family. Not only was her own brother in the Templar order, alongside cousins and uncles, but most of their relatives were also spread in the ranks of the Chantry. At this point, it was equal parts family reunion and political orchestration for her. It is also an out, one last taste of the world before she knows, with certainty, that she will be made to choose her position in her family’s expectations: become a wife or a Chantry sister. Her time is running out, and this is why she doesn’t want to spend the last of it calming down centuries of hatred over diner.

She turns, to glare at her mother. At least, she doesn’t want to do it without her. There isn’t any political party that she hasn’t navigated thanks to the patient guidance of her mother. But whereas once her mother had dark, black hair – it is now faded to a grey, and when before, during her childhood, her mother used to do this trip to the Chantry by horse, her daughter laughing between her arms, she is now preferring the rest of a carriage. Her daughter grew, but she just got old. It is a startling realization for the young woman to have, in the golden light of the morning, that her mother is now frail and aging. Even if she wanted to do it, her mother couldn’t physically withstand the long journey, or the cold weather upon the arrival.

It was an escape as well: given the opportunity to prove herself, and carve a path straight between the crossroad the destiny was putting her at. She wanted to laugh then, to agree just to please her ingenious mother. She was her only daughter after all, and she was born alongside the joyous ringing of the Chantry bells, and her mother had taken one look at her baby girl and was determined to give her the world, or as much of the world as she could give to another woman.

But before she can answer, the carriage halts to a stop. Her mother wipes her fingers alongside her daughter’s lips, erasing a mark of stray rouge, and pulls at the thin, lace veil she is wearing to cover her head, making it more presentable. It is a light colour, matching her dress, and it is a pious imitation of the statues of their most holies. Her father has insisted on this outfit for her, just an image of their reputation and a reminder of their role and quality in the world.

She links her arm with her mother’s, eyes trained to the sky. Even after years and years of doing every week, she cannot get used to the murmured thanks of the poor, who have just been sent coins by her father’s men, or the enthusiastic greetings of possible suitors, or the envious glances of fellow nobles. As time went by, it felt less like her finding a connection with the Maker of the world, and more like a theatre play that she cannot take part in, because she’s unsure of her role or of the script she has to parrot.

So she walks, tight lipped, taking her seat inside the Chantry, offering a chair to her mother, and her dropping on her knees to the cold floor, palms held together in front of her, eyes casted down in a perfect picture of modesty and belief. She feels pity towards her dress, washed just the night before, and she can feel the hilt of her daggers digging painfully in her thigs, at least needed support in keeping her awake during the preaching. She’s not sure if the Maker is supposed to hear you better just because you are in pain during your pleas, or because he’s seen your face in his house more often than others’, or because your house has the largest donation ever given in the history of the city.

It is one’s own badge of pride that they decide to rely on. She’s not sure she wants hers to be as fickle and unsure as religion’s teaching. Even now, the sermon that they are given is against what they’ve been told just three weeks before, and yet no one seems to notice, or to consider it the least queer.

The bells start ringing, above their head – and slowly, people begin to rise and trickle out into the street. Her mother slowly pats her head and her back, reward for another of these days spent together. Her father is supposed to be busy ruling, and her brothers each with their own titles – so it is the women of the Trevelyan that have to show their faces to the world, stand proof of their ties and their history. People will believe a great many things if they are shown they can rely on said beliefs. And their house has been just a great constant, and such a stable pillar for their people, such an easy path for their own.

The young lady sighs, wondering when exactly this stopped pleasing her, given that she’s gotten nothing less than what she could have possibly wanted, sometimes even before she knew she wanted it. As they ride back towards their estate, she thinks it must have been around the time her brothers placed a dagger in her hand for the first time, and she realized she doesn’t want to let it go.

It is with that same pure glee that she greets her second brother on the entrance steps, hands cupping his cheeks to get a good look at him, then having him pull out his tongue at her and throw an arm around her waist, raising her up effortlessly and spinning her around. She screams into the air, servants turning around to laugh alongside them. Behind them, she can hear her mother clearing her throat, and he puts her down slowly, to go and place his hands in his mother’s, kiss her forehead.

He still stinks from the road, probably back just a little while before them – and his sister turns around, stops one of the chamber ladies, demands a table to be set as soon as possible for them all, and a warm bath to be drawn for him. Out of all of her siblings, his is the only room still kept intact: although he has his own place within the Templars, being situated just outside the city, he has always been just half a day ride away – and it has always been her family’s delight to summon him among them for any and all possible excuses. Out of all her siblings, this is the one she loves the best, he is the one that taught her the most, that cared the most about the small girl who came into his life well into his teenage years.

She cannot remember him without the Templar uniform. Even with all the silks awaiting him at home, out of pride, he wears the cotton shirts of his peers. She finds him magnificent and an idiot for this choice. He also forces her in leather pants and shirts, demands spars and duels from her, and laughs when it is way too easy to best her. He is the only one who seems to care if she can fight on her own, though it is an activity that no one interrupts them from, which means it must be approved by the Bann. Her only weapons are gifts she’s gotten from him, alongside the stories about all the female Templars among his ranks. There’s a fierce protectiveness from him that translates into actual actions, rather than advice that paints her in nothing more than beautiful furniture.

If she wasn’t the only daughter, if she wasn’t so precious in securing a political tie because of her good blood, she wonders is her parents would have agreed to her following the steps of her brother. Though, when he joins them at the table after his bath, he is carrying an empty vial, and she knows things aren’t as easy as he would like to make them seem behind all his blinding smiles. After all, that’s the entire purpose of the Conclave that the two of them are supposed to attend together.

His fingers move to pull at her veil, teasing her even more by unknotting her hair-do when she tries to protest against it.

“Ass,” she mutters under her breathe, though her mother’s leg kicks her under the table and she bites her tongue as a result. He laughs again, leaning to plant a loud kiss on her cheek, and she stuffs a pie in his mouth just to make him stop.

“So, sister. I heard you almost let me be the only suffering Trevelyan out there.”

“Oh, and I would have done it gladly if someone –” here she stops to bite into an apple, staring pointedly at their mother “didn’t insist upon my presence. I am not even qualified to breathe in those meeting rooms.”

“Nonsense! You’d make a fine serving girl!”

“Ass!” This time she says it out loud, and her mother slaps, loudly, against her wrist. It leaves a stinging, red mark behind and she glowers at her brother, blaming.

“You know it doesn’t suit you to whine like a petulant child,” her mother says, calmly. “If you are aware of your own faults, then work on them. If you’re not willing to do so, then do not complain when others point them out to you.”

“Yes, mother,” she murmurs.

“And both of you will be on your best behaviour out there, I hope. I did not raise fools who bark at each other out of boredom.”

“It’s out of love we do it, mother,” he says from her side, and he pats her leg, where she keeps her daggers, asking for peace. She smiles in her bowl of soup, hides it behind the rim.

His spine straightens. “We are Trevelyans, mother.”

With that, he says a whole history in a sentence. It means they will do what must be done of them, and they will honour the name that they are wearing. It means she is a good daughter and he’s a loyal Templar – and no matter the place, no matter the time and no matter the setting, they will do right by this first and foremost.

This calms her, better than anything her daughter might have tried. There is some kind of comfort in that knowledge, that there’s always the safety net of their title and of their family, and all that it taught them. When uncertain, just follow Andraste’s words and your better’s orders, and pray it goes well. Sometimes, life is as easy as that.

Even if it isn’t fair. Even if it doesn’t leave space for questions.

After lunch, they retreat in their father’s study, discussing the details of their departure the next day. There’s a stiff bitterness in his tone whenever he talks to his daughter, and she can imagine exactly how displeased he is with having her go. But someone still has to be just a Trevelyan, and nothing more, and his choice is limited, at the moment, to her – his oldest would never be sent to such a meeting to begin with.

So he must agree to letting her have her own horse, have her own say in their family’s matters. She tries not to take it personal, that he lacks any more trust in her – it is just that, as much as her mother wished for a daughter, he aimed for a son. He didn’t quite make peace with the fact yet.

Only after all this, her brother double checking their servants’ work, are the two finally left alone. He calls her over in his room, where a big, wrapped present is waiting for her, his hideous scribbling accompanying the rope keeping it together. There’s no hint of what’s inside from the text, just normal teasing for the spoilt baby, and he patiently waits for her to open it.

Inside, the pieces of a leather fighting gear. The smell is faint, and the sewing high-quality, and her brother must have spent quite a considerable part of his pay for this. She blinks away her tears before they can fall, the awe still there, her fingers still touching at each surface they can find.

“Thank you.”

Murmured, softly, overwhelmed.

“The Conclave is more of a war gathering than they’d like to let you believe, sister. You won’t be left powerless if I can help it.”

“I have Andraste,” she says, but he just scoffs, incredulous.

“Because that worked so well so many times before.”

That makes her laugh, at last.

“Thank you,” she says again, because there’s nothing more than that that she can say to express how truly grateful she is.

“I’m glad you are coming, sister.”

But she can’t quite say the same, even if the next day she wears her brother’s gifts, proudly.

* * *

The travel itself is pleasant enough, spent in good inns and with good food, sharing memories of their childhood with her brother. They add layers as the weather turns colder and admire the landscape around them. One evening, he plays the lute – the next, she sings by voice. Halfway through, their party meets up with their uncle and aunt, working as escorts for the elder couple – as they arranged weeks prior through a letter. Her aunt immediately presses a silver hair pin in her hands, a beautiful gift that she puts to use the following morning. Her uncle spends one afternoon sharpening her daggers, and she’s reminder that their daughters won each hunting game between their families for the past three years.

Once their destination reached, she situates herself by their side, among the civilians present for the Conclave. Her brother hugs her goodbye, before joining his friends, and later in the day, a second degree cousin, now Chantry sister, finds her and they spend some time catching up. The tension is palpable in the air, but everyone is doing their best to stick to their own and try not to start anything. Divine Justinia is a wonderful respite in the midst of all; her kindness oozing off her, a softness in her voice that manager to lift the angriest frown, a power in her presence that silences even the rowdiest person.

Honestly, Lady Trevelyan admires the woman, finds some hope that the Conclave might actually come to an agreement after all, if she is to judge over all of it. And yet, in this world, everyone wants as much as they can get, and then even more if they can fool others into giving it to them. The negotiations are not that different from her own arguments with her tutors, spoiled and exasperated sides equally certain that they’re in the right.

So the days pass by, and at least the food is nice, and the wine flows freely in the evenings. She’s seen enough drunken Mothers. If bored, in the long afternoons when they aren’t allowed to be present to the talks, the guards ask her for a fight, and she trains alongside them until she knows her fingers will turn red in the water basin as she tries to wash away the dirt from her clothes. She reads out loud holy texts with the sisters in the morning, plays chess with the older participants, writes the letters for her aunt who left her glasses at home. Sometimes, a servant slips her a note – most from her brother, _Kill me_ written out of boredom and exasperation, some from admirers trying to tell her that she’s pretty, but only making crass comments that she immediately throws into the fire.

It’s life – but life as far from the one she knows as she will likely ever get.

And then, it all blows up. Or that’s what people tell her, because she cannot remember –


	2. dear god

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And so the Inquisition gets created.

The rope rubs painfully at her wrists when she comes to, and as she strains her movement against it, the door slams open. There’s light dancing in front of her eyes, fire glistening against the sharp iron of swords – but her ears are still ringing, as she tries to make sense of the angry, incriminating words thrown at her.

_Everyone is dead. Except of you._

For a second, the world stops all over again. She thinks of her brother and all of her other relatives, of the guards and servants, of the Templars and mages, of Divine Justinia. Then her hand glows, bright green and whereas Lady Trevelyan never saw magic up this close in her life, it turns out she just became capable of something she doesn’t know where to even begin to understand.

She has no idea how this happened, or why. She still tries to organize herself in time and space when the woman interrogating her grabs her shoulders, shakes her into the truth – and she strains against her ties, tries to make herself smaller. There’s nothing else she’d love to do more in this moment than just vanish. The silence afterwards is deafening.

She stumbles over her words, as she tries to piece together the last of her memories, a jumble of images flashed in the same telling colour of her hand. As she follows Cassandra outside, the sky that she thought as eternal as the Maker is being eaten away by a magical rift. A guard comes forward, slips a hand around her elbow, keeping her steady on her feet at the sight of all of this, though she drops to her knees a second later, when she feels the pulse from the sky in the palm of her hand.

She bites her tongue so that she won’t shout. Her heartbeat is loud and clear in her ears.

No matter how many questions she tries to ask the other woman, it all comes down to the same thing. Even in this, yet again, none of them have any choice. It’s pure logical action. There’s a gap in the sky, there’s someone who might be able to end it and that someone is her. There’s someone who made it happen, but everyone is dead, and she is the only link they have to the event.

“I didn’t choose this,” she says, scared- suddenly lost. There’s no guidance she can hope for in her situation, and no respite to let her brain catch up with her surroundings, no trust from the harsh woman warrior in front of her.

“None of us chose this.”

The sky splinters, green, above them and the young Trevelyan whimpers, clamping her other hand over the mark, trying to still the pulse of pain. She has to count to three in her head, before she is able to get up on her feet – this is all she has to do, just one step at a time. _Breathe._

She is dizzy, and her steps falter when Cassandra gets her back to her feet, moves her around like a lamb destined for sacrifice. There’s a gap in her memories that she cannot recall, and her fate – and the entire fate of the world is tied to those moments. She cannot understand how things got to this, like this.

So, instead, she runs, following a path of death towards even more destruction. Each time the sky pulses, she drops to the ground in pain, but it anchors her in reality, doesn’t let her mind slip too far away from the situation. And yet, the demons don’t feel real, neither the weapons that she picks from a fallen soldier in nothing but pure desperate attempt at survival.

She’s a messy fighter, relying on instincts because she lacks the practice, and where Cassandra needs only one smooth cut, she stabs and stabs all over again, panic rising in her throat; satisfaction too when the enemy eventually falls and she is still breathing. She doesn’t want to ever let go again of this pair of daggers.

Not even Cassandra can expect the two of them to make it to the other side of all of this with one of them not fighting. When more join them, it is a relief. Her breathe is already laboured, her body still weak, and Varric has the most beautiful crossbow she’s ever seen, and the skills to put it to great use.

Solas – she can pierce together some fever-fogged memories, waking up in an unknown bed with someone by her side, and even as she knows and recognizes his interest to be purely in the new magic that she possesses, there are thanks to be given for having a life saved. And if she wants to learn anything of her powers, then possibly the only place she can is him. His voice is soft and he is pleased with her, none of the incrimination from before anywhere to be discovered.

The mark pulses still, a reminder. Whatever may happen, this is what she is right now: a mark bearer, a rift closer. She must make her choices accordingly.

She’s seen too many dead not to help those that are still standing. Each fighting man is another chance given to them to push forward, so they must honour their sacrifices, and make sure those that live, can live with the consequences of today.

So they reach the Temple of Ashes, eventually. Or rather, the place where the Temple of Ashes used to stand. The corpses are still burning, hours and hours after the explosion – and there’s a pungent smell of charred skin in the air, and overturned dirt. Trevelyan stops, dead in her tracks, and her body heaves, as she crouches close to the ground. Her stomach is empty though, and the bitter taste of bile rises in her throat, but nothing else. There are tears in her eyes as she struggles to breathe, panic knotting in her throat, legs suddenly going faint under her. All around her, there’s only an immense mass of destruction – and she has no idea how she ended up alive, in the middle of all of this.

Varric’s hand at her back is kind, but firm. It helps bringing her back to reality.

If she looks somewhere else, there’s only the green shadows falling from the breach in the sky. If she tries to go straight ahead on the path, she has to pass by the dead bodies of so many. By the mad remnants of magic too powerful to bend, in a red as bright as their blood would have been otherwise. The red lyrium, in the midst of all of this too, feels like some kind of bad joke from the Maker. She has walked down these stairs and hallways just a couple of days ago. She has seen this place, before – before all of this, and her brain cannot comprehend that what she sees now is the one and the same. It feels like the changes in the world are just swallowing her up, and yet she is supposed to still be strong enough to claw her way out.

She wonders if any of these bodies is her brother’s. She wonders, even if it is, if she would ever be able to recognize him. And then she closes her eyes, and she refuses to think of it no more. She cannot even pray; it feels sacrilegious to invoke any kind of divinity in the midst of so much unnecessary death.

There’s a memory that should be hers stuck in the Fade, fuelled by the magic stilled in the air. Her voice sounds foreign to her own mind. Even if it could be proof of her innocence, she cannot claim this as her reality, or as her past; her mind still comes up empty when she tries to conjure the same thing. No matter how many questions Cassandra fires at her, a relentless need for truth and justice in her voice, she cannot offer her any satisfactory answers.

This vision is as new and as confusing for her as it is for anyone else.

She decides she hates demons. She hated them from the first one that she saw, once they started the trek down to the valley, and she hates them more the bigger they get. Even in her most daring dreams, she could have never guessed that one day will find her fighting all these kind of creatures. It helps, just a tiny bit, that there’s an army besides her, and some of the best fighters that she has ever seen. Yet, she is so hurt, and she is in so much pain, and she’s so desperate to see it all end.

It is pure rage and hate that keep her going, slashing at its legs, jumping to stab with her daggers at its arms, switching positions with Cassandra, when she has to interact with the breach, falling back to Solas when she tires, relying on Leliana’s archers to distract the demon for as long as it takes her to down a healing potion. She can feel the skin on her palms splitting open from the daggers, the rough skin of the handles scraping against swollen flesh. The undershirt she wears is dripped in sweat, and her hair is falling apart on her back. The stench of blood is suffocating.

And just like before, the world bursts green. The tales will say that people as far away as on the other side of the mountain felt the blast, and that for a second, the whole of Thedas blinked the telling colour of the Fade.

Trevelyan simply collapses without conscience.

* * *

She should have been dead, twice already in one single week. Her bones are sore, and there are healing blisters all around her palm, itching uncomfortably. The mark doesn’t hurt anymore, but when she glances down at it, it is still there. Her brain is foggy all over – tired from the stress of all of the events, though she is sick of having to will her mind into recalling the events of her life. Then it all comes rushing back: the death of her family, the demons that she fought, and there is still caked blood in her hair, as she desperately runs her hands through it, trying to force her a coming headache to still and the tears not to fall.

The servant comes in, giving her more profound apologies than she received in her entire life. Three days have passed, with her barely hanging on, delirious in nightmares and fevers that left her feeling weaker than before. Her hands are shaking as she drinks water from the cup next to her bed, as she gets dressed in the armour left in the chest by the bed. If she focuses on these simple tasks, takes them one by one, she can almost shake away the knowledge that the sky is breaking apart, that the order of the world has been deranged, that somewhere in there she plays a role that no one can explain.

Rumours are just rumours, no matter how well-meaning the spreaders may be. The soldiers that fought by her side create a path for her, towards the Chantry, fists to their chest in a sign of respect that she doesn’t feel like she deserves. The sky remains stained. She hasn’t done anything, even if the people in Haven are already spinning tales, even as the myth is already growing ever so bigger.

The Chantry feels as welcoming as it always did. The smell of the burnt wax, the soft light dancing on the walls. She takes a moment, alone, reading the scribbles of a prayer for the departed. It’s been a while since there has been any need of it in her own family, but she still remembers the words by heart, the life of nobility in Ostwick equal parts weddings and funerals. She wonders how many times her mother has recited it these past few days. There must be a gap in her heart as big as her older brother. She wants to hang on to the words, tries and fails to find any comfort in them. No matter what peace might be on the other side of life, it doesn’t change the fact that her brother is forever gone.

Her eyes close, pained – and she places the parchment back to its place. The gods are just that. Gods. The mere people down here have nothing interesting to offer, and there are even less worthy of the graces of the Maker. There’s certainly nothing special in her to deserve the immediate connections with Andraste. If any of this was true, she should have heard a divine calling years ago. If any of this was true, she knew a more deserving Trevelyan that should have been in her place instead. That is dead instead.

And yet, somehow – he is dead, and she is not. She cannot believe it’s anything else but pure luck that made it so. Anything else is just wishful thinking, just words. But words have power, if enough people believe them. But words have power, if the right people believe them.

Cassandra’s faith is blinding and immediate.

So is Trevelyan’s reply. She is no one’s chosen one, all the more Andraste’s.

“Aren’t you supposed to be familiar with the myths?” Cassandra bites back, frustrated at the lack of cooperation from her sole survivor.

“It is because I know them better than I know myself that I cannot claim to be anyone’s chosen,” she says, frowning, fingers absent-mindedly playing with the hem of her shirt. It is a most worrying thought to her, that someone would take a look at her and put her among the holies. But then again, she thinks, glancing down, her hand is glowing green and she suddenly does possess magical powers.

She feels like throwing up, again.

But there is one thing she recognizes from Cassandra’s speech: the symbol on her tome. Trevelyan’s family registers say of how generations ago, most of their ranks were part of the Inquisition instead, the Templar Order built out of this even older one. History is doomed to repeat itself, and desperate times take desperate measures.

To restore the Inquisition in a time of such unrest is a brave step. For those that will try to recall the days of old, it will be a sign that the current threat on Thedas is to be taken seriously. For those that will see just a new organization, it’s a chance to convince them to join the cause. Either way, using the right means, Cassandra is bound to succeed. Trevelyan has no doubt that this fierce woman, pushing against one of the highest alive authorities in the whole country, will do exactly that. Even with no leader, no numbers, and no Chantry support.

In the midst of chaos, there is always someone that will stand as the anchor for the rest.

“You cannot pretend this hasn’t changed you,” the Seeker says, softer this time that there’s no one else but people she trusts around.

Cassandra is, of course, right. Life used to be so much easier, before. There were names that came with history, that came with rules, that came with expectations for the future. There was delicacy to be expected in all the places where she is now sore and hurt. There was an outline that she could clearly see for each of her choices, prettily laid out in front of her. And yet, as she stares at each of these people so hell-bent on bringing together a fantasy of the books, she cannot imagine anything out of it. There’s an entire darkness of uncertainty: a sea of possibilities, unknown troubles. Anything at all could happen, and only the will of these people is gluing it all together.  
But much like the world she lives in, her own inner, personal life has split in half, with no hope of ever reconciling the two. Her past feels foreign to her, and so extremely far away. She cannot ever envision herself going back to that. Her future is bleak, and certainly full of hardships – but it promises her the chance to do something right, and find an answer for what had happened: to her and the world around her.

She knows – even if she doesn’t want to, she has to.

As far as anyone knows, there’s no one else who can close the rifts in the sky. The success of the world, and the success of the Inquisition, directly involves her. There is supposed to be a better world at the end of all of this. A place where she doesn’t have to be this hopeless, this powerless anymore. She remembers the dead bodies, now nameless, now nothing – and how there is someone behind it. She remembers the terrified, praying refugees – suddenly left homeless and faithless, just pawns in a game that involve them not at all. And she remembers Justinia’s call for help, and her inability to do anything about it.

She looks at all of them, one by one: Cassandra, fierce and determined. Josephine, sneakily delicate, Leliana, cunningly efficient and Cullen, strongly devoted. Here, with these people, she can do something. She can only hope that maybe, in the end, she would have made the right decision.

A sigh – her first unmitigated, uninfluenced decision.

She thinks – she thinks she wants to be part of it. And so, the Inquisition is reborn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i mention this will be slow? .... yeah


	3. and all god's people said

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a moment to breathe, a moment to hear.

And so, the Inquisition has the Herald of Andraste among them; equally a blessing and a challenge. Trevelyan looks down at the map spread on the war table, more extensive and detailed than any in her father’s collection. The tip of her pointer finger plays with one of the chess pieces strewn across it, moving it through valleys and rivers. How easy and how far away the decisions will feel, in time, from here? How is she supposed to balance out her choices correctly, when the broad, vast world is so tiny, when troops can fit in her palm, when lives are just numbers strewn across paper?

And how is her opinion supposed to matter in such things, when she is surrounded by way more impressive people? Daughters of a religious house, even from the Free Marches, rarely know of strategy and war beyond the history books. Her authority is solely given by her glowing hand, something that bears no proof of her skills, intelligence, hard work or willingness to do what is needed of her new position. These people are playing a dangerous game just for the religious validity of a mass-murder event. They’re taking a gamble, turning their prisoner from just a few days ago into their new member. They’re lucky she is nice and educated enough to be willing to listen to their input, manners not so easily forgotten, even in the face of the end of the world. It calms her in a way to know that they consider themselves good enough to mend whatever stupid decisions she might come to make. It scares her that she believes them capable enough too.

She works with the best of the best, after all. Just what in Andraste’s name did she agree to?

Cullen, from her left, speaks.

“Herald of Andraste. How do you feel about that title?”

The chess piece she is playing with falls against the table with a dull sound, too much force used.

“It is a little unsettling, to be honest.”

Though that doesn’t feel like the right word. She has been raised to worship the Maker and Andraste, and they’ve always been far-away figures in her life, untouchable in their distance and supposed perfection. She has her own doubts about the validity of the Chantry’s more recent practices, but she never questioned their religious figures. However, she always thought that the most connections she’ll have with the heavens will be through her family name. And yet here she is, parading around with a title that she doesn’t fit into, with a foreign pit in her stomach each time she hears someone reverently whispering it as she passes by.

If she looks in the mirror, she is just the same plain looking young woman – but yet, now when others look at her, they see someone saved by divine grace. No, unsettling doesn’t even begin to express all the uncomfortable ways that title makes her feel. It feels heretical, unfitting, untrue. And she’s standing there, wearing it as the biggest liar the world spit out. She never hated anything as much as she hates the green mark in her palm, the constant throbbing of it, never letting her forget.

She doesn’t feel prepared for this. She can promise to do her best, she can try it – but that doesn’t mean much in the face of the entirety of Thedas going against them. She’s overwhelmed by the size of the task they’ve all embarked onto and by the assured determination of everyone around her. In comparison, she feels just lost. At the same time, she knows it doesn’t matter; now that the title she wore for so long doesn’t really matter anymore, her new one dictates the duty she is to fulfil: close the breach. Since she cannot find the words to speak her doubts, and she doesn’t have sound enough arguments against her being here, she has to let her actions talk instead – and have them be bold enough to tell of what she cannot otherwise.

But even so, she doesn’t want to be left alone. She stumbles for questions to ask, unsure of what is expected of her, of who and what exactly these other people are. It’s better to listen to stories, to get quick lessons, than being alone. Alone she can hear her thoughts, too loud in her mind, whimpering fears, and in the midst of it, she can conjure back in her memories the life she had before. She isn’t mourning it, exactly, had no time to properly pause and realize it is now out of her reach forever, changed for eternity – but she misses the ease with which she has lived so far, the comforting feeling of belonging somewhere without even trying to, even when oddly ill-fitting. She misses her mother’s chiding, even if it was undeserved at all time, she misses her brothers’ antics, youth alive between them. She wishes she had properly said goodbye to her father that morning she last saw him, if only to acknowledge the years that passed them by to get them to the point where she became the spoke-person for their entire house.

The trouble with life is that you never know when it can change in just an instant.

She ponders on it as she walks around the headquarters of their new organization, memorizing layouts and locations, bumping into busy workers, shoving her body out of their way and retreating in her room when it becomes quickly obvious that she cannot just haunt the grounds aimlessly like that. She begs road-beaten mages to brew her potions to help her with her sleep, teas to help her with keeping at bay the memories, and she lays under her blanket in her bed, her body shivering despite not being cold, despair washing over her in waves of fear. No one bothers her for that first week, and she spent the few coins handed to her to buy herself this peace and quiet.

She runs laps around the camp in the still dark hours of the morning, after sleepless nights, her breathing painful in her chest, scratching at her throat – and it’s that intense burst of discomfort that pleases her, because for a minute, she forgets that she’s supposed to do anything else but focus on getting some air inside her lungs. She trains alongside the other new recruits, knowing herself to be lacking as well, though she knows it’ll take way more constant effort to have it show during actual fights. Her new armour still feels awkward around her body, the weight of the daggers, now visibly fastened to her back, weird but not unpleasant. She still doesn’t know what to do.

She thinks, if her family could see her now, they’ll cry the tears that she can’t seem to consider herself worthy to shed.

She waits for the messenger to make his way to her room every afternoon, and each time she is disappointed. She hovers sometimes in the chantry, talking with reverent sisters, just praying that one of the Inquisition’s higher ranks would pull her aside, push a letter with her family’s crest on it in her palms. It never happens, and no matter how long she waits, no matter how sure she is that her name has been obviously tied to the events at the Conclave –word from the Trevelyans never arrive. There’s no inquiry about their only daughter’s well-being, even as she heard from one of Leliana’s spies that condolences and indignation about the situation reached the Inquisition from all the big noble houses of Ostwick.

She counts the days, knows that her brother’s funeral must have been marked by some symbolic gathering in the Chantry she has visited for years upon years – and lets go. Steels herself against the disappointment, swallows it whole, way easier than she expected, having had it hinted at for her entire life. The undeserving daughter is a Trevelyan no more, not in anything but the name. Both an easy relief and a burning shame.

Then – when she can postpone it no more by hunting for ratios, scouting for elfroot, waiting for letters and more-or-less awkwardly introducing herself to the many friendly and unfriendly faces in the Inquisition – she starts actually reaching out to those who made this entire thing possible in the first place. Of course, in life there is no one to give you answers but yourself. And yet, there’s no pain in at least asking anyway. She wants to catch the words of these people, of these way better people, and put them together like in a puzzle. And then, maybe then, things will start making sense again. Maybe then all her doubts will paint a complete picture, and she’ll figure out a way to solve it all.

* * *

She starts with Josephine because it feels the safest. Her last name is one that she’s been familiar with for a long time, thanks to her mother’s letters and the political ties of her father. It’s easy to just face something that she knows so much about, and only then dive directly into the wide possibilities of all of the others. And, in the overbearing newness of Haven, the young Montilyet is as close to the old normalcy as it goes.

Of course, she is already hard at her job, discussing treaties with the faintest smile on her face, and the gentlest of hand gestures, the most captivating tilts in her voice as she drives her point. She is entirely radiant, and not just because of her outfit choices: donned in the afterglow of someone doing what they’re the best at.

Josephine is a skilled speaker, understandably so given her background and current position in the organization, but Trevelyan has had people like her and like the Marquis around her all her life. If there is one thing that she can do for sure, that is to pick up when asshole nobles are bluffing. And obviously, Josephine’s skills work in the same exact area, though she is way politer and assured than she would have been in the face of a screaming man. But no lies are good without a little bit of truth in them, and when the discussion moved onto the subject of Divine Justinia and her multiple qualities, it is clear that neither of them are lying.

Trevelyan wonders how that would be like: to be so extraordinary in life that the entire world mourns you after you’re gone.

After the Marquis is gone, she smiles at Josephine, a gesture that the other woman easily reciprocates.

“Nice to meet you, properly” she says, gesturing to the armchair on the other side of her desk, always the diplomat. Trevelyan takes a seat, glances at the already imposing stacks of papers that the ambassador was probably making her way through before being interrupted by the Marquis. Speaking of which, it’s not a nice reminder to get, so early in the day, that there are enough people opposed to her very existence. She leans forward, snatches one of the stale biscuits that Josephine has on her desk, and munches on it silently.

Josephine looks at the Herald’s face, her emotions visible, her face open like a book, and smiles.

“To some, you are our only hope. And to others, a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong. But you’re with the former group, if that helps. And I will not leave everything to you. I know your beginning with us was… rocky.”

Trevelyan grabs another biscuit, agreeing that the choice of words can’t quite contain the events of the past few days, but more pacified that at least someone else acknowledges the wrongs that had been done to her. However, she doesn’t say anything. The ambassador, for a brief second, even dares to look scolded by the memory.

“We must extend the reach of the Inquisition’s influence. I’ll take care of the rumours and the angry nobility, if you take care of killing demons and closing rifts in the sky.”

This time, she picks up the plate of sweets and holds it in the air, for easier access for the Herald, a peace offering. She sounds so sure of herself, that for a second, there’s no doubt in Trevelyan’s heart that they’ll succeed at anything they put their mind to. If the two of them would be back in one of their families’ home, that speech right there would be a deal sealed, a promise of partnership. Friendship, even. It’s something that their houses have shared for decades, between their rulers, and somehow fate put both of them in the same place, when it seemed like she needed it the most.

“Very well, I will do my best,” she says, raising to her feet.

“Likewise,” Josephine says, already returning to her work, replying to letters from noble houses far away, but not missing the way the other woman sighs, somewhat relieved.

In the corner, there’s Minaeve, a mage elf, tinkering with objects and pouring over studies. Despite the Trevelyan’s connection with the Chantry, in a family as big, with a history as long and a network as large – she’s sure they have equal parts relatives in the Templar order and the Circle both. Her family’s teachings have focused more on the worship of Andraste, rather than the hating of mages, and her own hand now bursts with power that she cannot explain.

She despises the Fade, and hates demons – but it’s a conclusion that she came to herself, in the past few weeks since the Conclave. Her sheltered life has kept her out of the path of stray mages, and her encounters so far have given her no reason to fear. Solas has saved her life, multiple times, and his knowledge is at the heart of anything they might achieve as an organization. At the end of the day, all humans, mages included, can be either good or bad. The world is only frightening because they don’t understand it. So there’s something quite admirable in this young girl, just wanting to find her own answers.

Isn’t this what all of them are doing, while stumbling through life? So the Herald makes up her mind to drop by any weird artefact she might encounter on her way to this bright-eyed mage.

* * *

She stops by the tavern, asking for a tea from the barmaid, even if she could easily brew it in her own room, only to see her kind smile. It’s been the easiest banter, the girl fiery and letting her mouth run off before her mind catches up, and it’s the unfiltered welcome that she appreciates so much. It feels a lot like clumsy flirting, but the Herald is kind in her refusal, and their conversation is no more awkward because of it. She likes to unwind in here, surrounded by people who slowly resume their interrupted conversations, who soon forget who she is and that she’s there with the rest of them at all. It’s the bustle, combined with the singing, that she likes so much, the smell of alcohol and fresh bread, the smoked meat. It’s calming her down, spending an hour or two nursing her tea and reading from a book she paid way too much for from a sneaky merchant.

But she’s been desperate for some reminders of other lives than those she’s familiar with, and even if the steamy romances would not have normally been her first choices, they’re not totally unwelcome. She’s been desperate to carve spaces for herself wherever she finds the slightest of openings, knowing that it could be snitched as easily as it was given, just like before. This time around, she is also trying to gather her courage to continue with her proper greetings.

To be a spymaster, it obviously requires an array of knowledge and talent, which makes Leliana so untouchable in her mind. She’s a woman who can achieve so much, who can do so much, and it’s something humbling in knowing she’d choose the shabby beginning of the Inquisition to use her resources. If the rumours are to be believed, she’d also travelled by the side of the Hero of Fereldan, and Trevelyan wonders, again, what is she supposed to do in the midst of all these people, how can she measure up against them, how can she even try to help them, when they’re so obviously capable already.

And yet, nothing can truly prepare her for the sight of Leliana fervently praying. It burns, seeing someone believe with so much pain and so much love, desperate at the lack of answers, desperate at the state of the world that the Maker is supposed to preside over. Her voice, however is clear, no matter how hurt.

“Is death your only blessing? If the Maker willed this, what is it if not a game or a cruel joke?”

Trevelyan leans against the pillar of the tent, her legs suddenly going weak. She tries to blink and breathe away the panic surging up her throat, the reminder of her brother that hits her at Leliana’s words. Yes, the Maker is one cruel sadistic bastard for whatever has been going on. She’s not sure she can forgive him, and it’s a bit easier to bear the idea now that she sees someone equally as angry at its will. If the Maker doesn’t intervene to save the best of his people, then what chance is there for the rest of them?

She’s silent as Leliana goes on, lost in a past that the Herald cannot even glimpse at, so much lost and so much found in the space between then and now. Her hands remain clasped together, a reverent gesture even during a faith anguish, the consolation of familiarity. Even if she wants answers from this sole survivor, she cannot offer them to her. She knows exactly as much as they do.

“I speak for no one but myself and I have no answer for you,” the Trevelyan says, realizing that, indeed, for the first time in her life probably, there is no one else to hold responsibility for her actions and her words but herself. There’s no more reputation to keep at bay her failures, and no more expectations censuring her words. She’s totally free.

What a sickly terrifying thought. It’s way too much freedom, too suddenly dropped onto her, and besides muttering her refusals at other’s impressions of her, there’s not much that she knows to do with it. So she mutters her goodbyes, runs away.

* * *

She goes to Varric just because she thinks he’ll ease her out of her anxieties: half jokes and half comfort, the man feels ten times as big as he actually is, the first easy smile she saw in the midst of everything. She liked him from the first second, a whirlwind with an aim better than she’s ever seen.

She nods at the trunk of the tree near his, and with an ample gesture, he allows her to take a seat next to him. The fire is burning in front of them, and she stretches her arms above it, her fingers biting painfully at the warmth unfreezing them. She’s gotten better at the whole snow and cold thing, but she’s still not entirely comfortable with it, and she’s often shivering the moment she stops moving at all. She’s missing the lace-thin dresses, the warm sun, the sound of waves. Varric’s little corner is a welcomed respite from the biting winds.

He pats her shoulder, so hard that she almost stumbles forward. He chuckles, a deep and content sound, eyes following the Seeker on the other side of the courtyard, heading towards the training grounds, probably looking for Cullen.

“Now that Cassandra is out of earshot, how are you holding up? You went from being one of the most wanted criminals in Thedas to joining an army of the faithful. Most people would have spread that out over more than one day.”

Despite the words being so frank, there’s nothing in his tone to show any kind of judgement of biting commentary. She feels totally at ease, even as an ex-criminal, next to this man so good at coating her out of her shell. She doesn’t even want to guard herself in front of him, when it’s so easy to want Varric to like her and believe her. She sighs, fingers splaying in the air as she rolls her wrists around.

“I have no idea what is happening anymore.”

She holds her breath, hopes for – something, anything.

“That makes two of us.”

She laughs, though there’s no emotion in it.

“Look, kid, bad for morale would be an understatement. I can’t believe anyone was in there and lived. Even I can’t walk away and just leave that to sort itself out.”

Then she is glad at least he’s here. She looks at the glowing hand. There are many people doing exactly what he did: looking up in the sky, and choosing to try and do something about it, rather than idly wait for someone to solve the problem. She’s grateful for them: the experts at the head of this organization, the untrained men pouring in every day, every spy at each knot of their network. Already all of the fallen people.

Varric’s fingers touch her palm, tracing the mark.

“I’ve written enough tragedies to know where this is going. Heroes are everywhere. But the hole in the sky. We are going to need a miracle.”

But she is not what they are looking for, she’s no miracle. The only holy surprise that she is willing to trust in is whatever is going on in the Inquisition at the moment: the mingling of all these different people, hell-bent on achieving their common purpose. She wonders if they look around in awe and wonder, just like she does, how on earth they came to this exact point in their life. If they sometimes talk to their new allies and comrades and pause, for a brief second, to realize that under normal circumstances, they would have never been on speaking terms with someone so different from what they’ve known before all of this.

The world is changing, and she’s not the only one it is changing for. Each and every person she shares ratios with, she passes by, she asks and is asked for favours has had their life immensely perturbed by what is going on. And yet, each and every person she shares ratios with, she passes by, she asks and is asked for favours has decided to make out of this very peculiar situation their new normal.

Oh well, then she would have to do the same. She sits next to Varric, speaking only to urge a new story out of him – about Kirkwall and the Champion, about his family, about his own spies strewn across Thedas. His voice is steady all throughout, and she doesn’t know how much time passes between their first shared words and the moment a messenger boy comes passing several notes to Varric. He gets up, unperturbed, and with a slight nod in her direction, he leaves to find an empty desk.

From where she is sitting, she watches the sun set. A window under the roof of the tavern burns bright red; and it feels like it’s not just the late sunlight making it so. This is her life, which must begin again. Up until now, all her life has been a fever to be perfected – and now already her face is cloudy, dark with grief and worry. Her mother would have pressed her finger in-between her eyebrows, smoothing out the deep lines burying into her skin, but she has no one now to dictate bad behaviour out of her. Her shoulders slouch. Is it so bad, to have it start here: the night falling on a still bustling village, the snow sparkling pink under the light? She’s been thinking too much, of too many things at the same time, and purposelessly, for there is nothing else that she can do but accept her new destiny.

She just – she wishes she could find someone who would hear her say hello, and understand that her sorrow, her horror burns as bright as the mark on her hand, greener than ice.

* * *

She doesn’t even eat breakfast before walking to find Solas. She fears that if she waits too long, he’ll be deep into his studies, or too connected with the Fade – and she’s just slightly terrified of that whole realm that she doesn’t want to poke at it before she really has to. Her entire doubts wash away the moment he turns to her, easy smile and kind voice, and she smiles despite herself. He’s the least threatening presence here, and she tries not to remember the way he blew up the enemy to pieces. She’s glad he’s on their side, then.

“Every great war has its heroes. I am just curious what kind you will be.”

She doesn’t want to believe, quite yet, that they’re supposed to go at war, against demons no less, for an undetermined period of time. She doesn’t want to agree, either, to the idea that she’s their hero.

“Hopefully the one that lives,” she says, because the mark has been aching ever since she woke up that morning, and she is cranky enough that, now that her old life is gone, she wants to live long enough to make something out of this new one. She cannot imagine herself dying for this cause, after randomly being thrown into a role she took completely unwilling.

But people die all the time, for all kind of stupid reasons. She didn’t expect the apostate mage to be the one to remind her of this, what with his fear of the Templars.

“Cassandra trusts you,” she says, trying to ease away his doubt, because he is a brilliant mage, and he’s done so much for them already, there’s no way the others hadn’t acknowledge that already. “She won’t allow anyone to put you in a Circle.”

“Technically, Circles don’t exist anymore,” he says, as an afterthought.

“True. So.”

* * *

She’s scared of Cassandra. In awe, entirely admiring this head-strong woman who shows every single thought on her face and who voices out every opinion that she has, but still scared of her. That’s why, after hurriedly shoving a piece of bread in her mouth, she puts the rest of the food making up her breakfast and walks towards Cassandra’s usual spot. She has the distinct impression that the other woman tends to get so busy, so caught up in her work, that she can easily forget about her meals. Trevelyan doesn’t really know why she tries to bribe the one person that seems to have the most defined moral compass out of all of them, but considering the start of their relationships, she figures it certainly cannot hurt.

Just like with all the other partners she found in the Inquisition, Cassandra is also fighting her own inner dilemmas, she’s just as torn about what’s happening around her like the young Trevelyan feels.

She places the plate on the crates that Cassandra uses as a table, a pair of gauntlets in a corner. The Seeker glances at the Herald, at that proof of peace gestures, and sighs. The other woman can’t really figure out if it’s out of annoyance at her presence, or because of any other reason.

“One day they might write about me as a traitor, a madwoman, a fool. And they might be right.”

Trevelyan looks around her, listens to the bustle of a forming army training, to the cries of passing merchants, sees the symbol of the Inquisition crudely drawn into walls and tent laps – and doubts the person who put this together be anything but a spark of genius. But history has its funny ways of twisting facts, especially once the hardships have passed. It’s easy to pass on judgement once you’re sitting comfortably, and it’s harder to do something while you’re in the midst of tragedy and crisis. People will stand in the fire and complain that it is hot. It takes people like Cassandra to put out the flames.

The young lady, wonders if from the comfort of her home, she would have picked her daggers, stepped over her father’s orders, just to join the ranks of the people fighting against a universal threat. She knows what she is right now, she is just because of the Mark – and in her ordinary circumstances, she doesn’t know if she would have been brave enough to do the right, correct thing. She is scared, terrified really, of what the future holds. It makes it easier to bear when others, like Cassandra are so reassured of their choices. Or when others, like Varric, are scared too. It makes it obvious that the only thing that truly matters is to at least try.

The isles of _what-if_ are uninhabitable. She can get lost for days into possible scenarios of her life, she can judge some of her selves that will never get to happen as much as she likes, but at the end of the day, this right here is the only place that truly matters.

Under Cassandra’s armour, she can see the delicate chain of a golden necklace, a symbol of Andraste resting against her collarbones. How terrible it feels, to be herself and supposedly the Herald of an entire religion at the same time. She doesn’t want to deceive people who put so much of their heart into their faith, and Cassandra the least of them.

“I don’t believe I am chosen,” she says, biting down on her lip and refusing to meet the Seeker’s eyes. She’s wearing gloves, covering most of the green pulse of the Mark, hiding away the proof of her status.

“If you do not believe you are chosen, then does it mean you also don’t believe in the Maker?”

Trevelyan thinks of the Chantry, with its comforting wax smell. She thinks of the prayers, that she knows by heart. She thinks of her mother’s arm in hers, each week, as they walked up the stairs, greeting the sisters. She thinks of the statues, cold and all-seeing. She thinks of the myths, withstanding the harsh passing of time, tragedy after tragedy. She thinks of the Conclave, and the explosion that rendered it non-existent. She thinks of her brother, dead. She hears the Chantry bells in her mind, and she closes her eyes against all these thoughts. All that she’s been tells her she believes. All she became tells her she does not. There’s a phantom itch at the tip of her fingers.

“I – I don’t know.”

Cassandra’s expression turns sour, just for a brief moment. But it’s an answer that she expected to get, so she does not let it bother her too much. One’s own faith is not hinged on other’s. Still, she changes the topic to something else; their Herald looks definitely uncomfortable. She bites into the breakfast that she brought her.

“Do you consider Free Marches your home, are you eager to go back?”

It’s easy for Trevelyan to lose herself in her memories. Compared to everyone else, she had no time to adjust to the idea that her home is not home anymore. There’s a gap in her heart that only her parents’ handwriting might fill, and yet what she needs never comes. It never did before either, so she doesn’t know why she is surprised now.

“I might, once this is done.”

She wonders if her father would have made an office out of her bedroom by then. If her dresses would be given away. How many candles would be lit for her deceased brother. If the servants would recognize her. If her mother would manage to have her back pains massaged and healed away. If she wold be welcomed back in the first place.

Cassandra sighs, a lost look on her face.

“It will not be the same, once you do.”

Although her words are for the Herald, it feels like she is talking about her own life. Even if the original story did not reach her in Ostwick, Trevelyan heard the rumours from the soldiers here, in the late hours of the night. There’s a past as heavy and as large as Cassandra herself behind the Seeker’s position. Maybe, just maybe, the two of them are not that different: noble ladies carving paths on unfamiliar roads that their families wouldn’t have even been able to imagine them.

The Inquisition will be alright. Especially with Cassandra as its right hand. Because what does a hand do? It gives, it takes, it beckons… it makes a fist. So the Inquisition will grow and it will fight and it will reason with others, and it will earn its ground and it will get its reputation.

She leaves the Seeker to finish her meal, feeling a bit less burdened. A bit more grateful.

Trevelyan watches their new soldiers training outside, her feet freezing in her leather boots. She thinks it’ll be a good idea to add an extra pair of socks next time she decides to trek around the camp for an unknown period of time. Her ears are hurting to the point that she stops feeling them like part of herself, and if she didn’t spend so much time tying up her hair in that perfect little knot of braids, maybe she would have pulled it out, allowing the extra warmth to sip into her body. Like it is, she just stands with her arms crossed, hearing Cullen yelling out drilling orders for their new recruits – and she memorizes their parring moves, the distance between their feet. Her daggers have been sent to a well-deserved sharpening, and she’s been thrown to the ground by a very excited captain so many times that she lost count already. Her body hurts at the joints, and she’s dying for a warm bath, but she keeps her gaze fixed to the training men, willing her brain to memorize what her body can’t catch up with quite yet.

Something in Cullen reminds her of her brother, and with the sun glaring at his back, he could almost be an apparition of a ghost. Maybe it’s a bit of the Templar training, his posture straight, reassured as he shouts orders for the men, his fingers playing across the hilt of his sword. Maybe it’s a bit of the honour that he keeps so close, doing whatever he considers right at whatever price he is willing to pay – something her brother was so good, so kind at. Maybe it’s the way he looks at her directly in the eye, a faint beginning of a smile at the corner of his lips, patiently waiting for her reply, for her opinion in each of their councils. Maybe it’s how good he is at fighting, at leading – something that only the men in her family learnt to do at all.

She has to blink, hard, before she is able to refocus at all. With one last shout towards his army, Cullen turns to her. She’s incredibly jealous of his furs at the moment. She smiles at him, half caught in her memory, half just wanting to get on the good side of this person that grounds her so much to who she used to be.

“I understand our situation,” Cullen says, glancing at these untrained soldiers he is supposed to build into an army, eyeing the refugee carts that already seem to crowd the village, knowing that there are many more on the way. “And I appreciate your opinion, whenever you deem it right to share it.”

_Huh,_ so someone is really willing to listen. Even if she knows they might disagree. Even if she knows less than any of them. Trevelyan uncrosses her arms, not less cold, but less guarded.

“You know that it is enough that you would try to help.”

That’s a good philosophy to have at the dawn of a war. It’s also just a general truth. In the face of the impossible and the hard, it is enough to just try, it is enough to help.

“Spoken like a true person from the Free Marches,” she says, though she smiles. In a camp as small and bored as theirs, it’s impossible to keep anything a secret, especially on those ruling it. She certainly doesn’t envy his position, a Templar in the Champion’s Kirkwall. The Free Marches have a strange way of adopting every one of their newcomers, and she has no doubt that even if Cullen is intimidatingly still a Ferelden, a bit of his time in Kirkwall will always be with him too. After all, waves of refugees came into their cities alongside the waves of the sea, and nowhere else in Thedas was such a bustle of different people as in her cities. It’s something that she always loved about her hometown, or about the visits to the neighbouring cities.

Compared to that, this place feels so quick to judge. Maybe that’s why she was so quick to defend her place here at all. Maybe it’s time that she stops doing so.


	4. if we start cracking at the center

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The challenges of being the Herald of Andraste in an yet unrecognized organization - oh, and Iron Bull, eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song recommendation for this chapter: PVRIS - Dead Weight

The first time she allows herself to move further from the camp on an actual Inquisition-related business is to find Mother Giselle. Besides the new-born Inquisition, all other organizations, religious, political or otherwise, have blown up alongside the Temple of Ashes. Usually, when one constant of the world collapses, all the other start at least being questioned, if not following in its steps.

She takes Cassandra, because she’s already used to her fighting style, and Varric because his aim never fails. Solas, because the blanket of his magic is so familiar to her brain already. Scout Harding is already hard at work, a presence so chatty and positive that for a second, the Herald forgets that she’s supposed to get her supplies and head into battle. The minutes are passing by, and each one counts – so Cassandra pulls at her elbow, and hurries her along unmapped paths.

She hasn’t trained for long, but she trained often with the best fighters in the Inquisition – and the difference is already telling. Her skin is rough on her palms and at her heels, and the armour is now more comfortable, her weapons more familiar. She ducks out of Cassandra’s way, to let her bash an enemy to the ground with her shield, and throws one of her daggers between the eyes of another, right as they were getting too close to Solas. She can feel a burst of flame at her back, and she hurries to pick her dagger, refusing to look back at the damage the magic has done.

When she’s in a battle, like this, her life on the line and everything too real, her body’s movements too acute, the sounds too loud, she feels detached. It’s almost mechanic, the way in which she stabs and jumps and drinks her potions. Up until this point, everything in her life has been simulated, and her brain takes a while to catch up with the fact that whatever is happening around her, it is in real time, all stakes raised. So the five seconds after the last of their enemy falls to the ground, the silence that follows feels like her head is underwater, a static noise at the back of her thoughts, a brief pause before she gets moving towards the refugees and Mother Giselle, Varric searching up the corpses for valuables. 

The path opens up before her, people hurriedly making way. She doesn’t know if it’s because of the glow in her palm, or the blood splattering her shirt. If there is one thing that the Herald of Andraste does not doubt is the ferocity of people’s feelings. Though she is never sure if they hate her or if they love her, and when.

Mother Giselle, however, is one of the most levelled headed people from the Chantry that she met, and she had enough money and fame hungry individuals search for her attention during her life. The older woman takes a look at this wide-eyed, straight-backed girl and already makes her mind up about humanity’s hero. Around her, people are suspiciously eyeing the both of them, but a smile from her immediately calms them.

She raises a hand, pats the Herald’s head, watches as the younger woman almost breaks down under the kind gesture. Trevelyan feels suddenly so comforted, in a way that all her attempts never managed to. There’s something about a sister of the Chantry, moved simply by her want to do good, that picks her undone. The somewhat reminder that this could have been her life, or her place of belonging.

But then Mother Giselle speaks, and the illusion is shattered, even if her touch never leaves the Herald. Of course, there are people she has to convince of the authenticity of her Mark, and the purpose of the Inquisition – even when she herself doubts them.

“They have heard only frightful tales of you. Give them something else to believe. You don’t need to convince them all, you just need some to doubt.”

Well, that can’t be too hard, can it? After all, she works with spies and seasoned authorities. After all, they need only one look in her direction to realize that the Fade has a claim on her. After all, she’s been a noble, and nobility is notoriously good at bargaining and lying.

The soldiers are busy setting up camp, and the Inquisitor sits next to Mother Giselle, listens to her calm voice as she recites the prayer of the story of how the world came to be; probably a subtle reminder that this is what they’re all fighting for.

The Hinterlands are a calmer area than Haven, the Trevelyan thinks, the weather just a tad bit warmer during the day, though there’s need for blankets and for food – and in the midst of it all, the war between the mages and the Templars rages on. She remembers, how the Templars are supposed to want to protect the common folk, nothing quite like those going on rampant, killing off anyone even accidentally crossing their path. There are enough people hurt in the camp, even more separated from their families and friends, even more just too tired, too traumatized to care.

She wants to focus on finding supplies and food for them first. Slowly, the wounded ones will recover, and they’ll accompany their trek back to Haven, alongside Mother Giselle. All these people called her _Your Worship_ as she passed by, reverently touching the ends of her leather armour; look up to the organization, to _her_ for help. Disappointing them, in this case, means their death. And she knows it’s just the first of such heavy failure burden.

She thought she’s fought her worst when that huge monster popped out of the breach. Turns out, one of the most terrifying sights she’s seen is that of a bear charging at her. For a second, she freezes on the spot: she’s seen a bear in real life only on a visit to Orlais, where one of the eccentric nobles kept one as a pet, chained by heavy iron and scared with magic into submission. Like this, the animal is freaking terrifying. Of course, they bring it down eventually, and Varric carefully puts the fur away. Yet, the tremble in her bones doesn’t succumb for a while. Just another reminder that there’s nothing even similar to her usual normality to be found in the midst of the Inquisition – and sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing. Whichever it might be, she has to adjust, shake off the fear, ignore the pain, and move on.

She’s already tired.

She realizes quick into their Hinterlands exploration how narrow her life has actually been so far. Not only is her entire body aching and sweating by noon, the terrain difficult at times, way too many groups to fight on the way. By the third day, she loses count of people she’s killed, she stops feeling like throwing up when she washes away the blood and grim of the day by the end of it. Sometimes she gets lost into the action, scrubs so hard that the tip of her fingers bleed. There’s rumours of a cult – and her hand slips when sharpening her daggers. Then there’s an organized presence entirely too bothered by the Inquisition’s troops – and she slips on her way down a hill, directly into the cold waters of a lake. Even with all the pain, a pain that is vibrantly real, all the other things don’t feel like it. Sometimes, when she tells Cassandra something, she stops mid-sentence, questions if her story and information is actually a thing that truly happened, or she made it up in a dream and never realized the difference.

Eventually, it is her companions that snap her out of it, slowly and patiently. Varric can recognize a girl haunted by terrors from a mile away at this point, and he gives her his tastiest part of the hunt, starts telling one of his favourite stories. Cassandra is, without failing, always at her back as they charge side by side into battle, and it’s a more comforting act than she probably knows. Solas explains to her about the Fade without being asked before, if only to diffuse her own anxiety over the green glowing mark that is anchoring her to all of this, that is anchoring part of another world to theirs, through her.

However, for her, the Fade is still a foreign, scary realm. There’s nothing that she wants to do with it, and the reverence with which Solas speaks about it, the soft edge in his voice when he talks about the spirits that he encountered, makes her skin crawl with fear and discomfort.

They close rifts, one after another. They set up camps, conquer territories in the name of what they believe in, what they promote as their truth. Trevelyan’s hand itches with the magic it used, and after a week and a bit, they return to Haven for an afternoon, making sure the people under their protection have enough resources, asking Mother Giselle what else she might need in her care for the refugees, setting them up inside the town’s chantry and along the camp.

It’s truly fascinating how, despite the Mark, people still come up to her, ask her if she is the supposedly holy figure at the backbone of the organization. It’s like they can’t quite believe the plain looking woman could stir up so many rumours, could have survived so much in such a short span of time. When she looks down in her water basin, or when she checks her image in the window at night, Trevelyan has the same problem. Still, whenever stopped, whenever asked, she denies any relation with Andraste. Time and time again, she crushes hopes or she strengthens beliefs with her words. It’s a heavy weight to add to her speech.

But, she starts recognizing, as she meets more and more allies, people believe in way more than religion. They believe in other people, in made promises, in their own two eyes, in their ideas about the world, in the force of their weapons way before they trust other’s words. The Templar, Lysette, choosing to be part of the Inquisition, rather than join her people in a self-destroying war of righteousness, makes this very obvious to her.

“I did not join the order to adjust my faith so easily, but I appreciate what the Inqusition’s trying to do, and your role in it. One person trying to do something can make a difference. You should keep that in mind, Herald.”

Trevelyan wonders if this is about herself, and she just uses the Herald as a mirror. Or if this is about the young noblewoman in front of her, pushed and shoved in every direction by the circumstances around her – and her words are just an attempt at comfort. But another thing that she starts recognizing is that one can understand whatever they please out of the words they hear. So the Herald chooses to straighten her back, and received some strength from this – a reason to keep going, when she was almost done with wanting to move at all.

She leaves her findings to Maeve, greets Josephine in-between the messengers making their rounds in her office. She does not expect the direct question about her family, and whether they will be willing to give official support to the Inquisition. She stops, stares at Josephine, heir to her own house, out here doing a job out of her own want – and doesn’t know how exactly to answer.

Of course, her entire house is scrambling for status like they’ve been born and raised in Orlais. Depending on what kinds of words about the Inquisition reached them, her father might be interested to associate his name with their still new organization. Considering one of their sons, a Templar no more, died at the Temple of the Sacred Ashes, they might feel responsible to support the one institution who actively tries to find a culprit for that genocide, and who is devoted to stopping anything like that happening again by closing the Breach. The Chantry is probably equally in shambles back home as well, so there is not much organized action taking place otherwise, and there might be merit in getting involved with the situation early on. And then there’s this – the Mark, her new title, and the honour that comes with having the Herald of Andraste being a Trevelyan, if it’s proven that it is true, that there’s Maker’s touch in her new power, that she can actually seal the rifts and fight the demons.

And then there’s the absence of letters actually intended to her, and she wants to scream in frustration or howl in pain. Instead, she gives the ok to Josephine to reach out to her family. Something must come out of it, in the end.

Her first question to Mother Giselle is about the people; those right here under their symbol, and those far-away who feel equally as lost and pained at the loss of their Divine. If she cannot properly mourn her losses, then at least she wants to allow this luxury to others. And if she is to find comfort in a new purpose, then at least someone (like Mother Giselle with her kind words, or like Leliana with her eye for potential, or like Cullen with brightly burning determination) maybe will be able to offer the same thing to these people as well.

“A task such as closing the breach is a heavy burden. I hope you do not carry it alone. We remember Andraste, but Andraste did not carry the Chant of Light alone. She had generals, advisors… even her husband, for a time. Do everything within your power… but remember those who would help you.”

The Herald thinks of the many people she has met during this time, each with their own individual worries and tasks, fears and motivations – and how she cannot possibly dare to add to their own hunched backs, to their already full schedule. Everyone in the Inquisition has been running around the clock, catching naps in uncomfortable places and at odd times, taking away the piece of bread at their mouth to share with whoever passes their door. Anyone willing to help, is already helping the tens and hundreds asking the Inquisition for protection and guidance. Their last worry should be the religious figure they’re trying to build – when she is just a mere human on top of that. The young Trevelyan shivers in her coat, stares at a statue of Andraste, thinking of Mother Giselle’s words.

“You keep talking as though I’m the equal of Andraste. Do you know how unnerving that is?”

“I can only imagine. But we are all given to our purpose under the Maker. A sword does not ask to be forged. And frankly, if such a comparison gives you pause, I do not see that as a bad thing.”

She thinks if this is truly her supposed path; if the Maker plucked her out of her past life, taken from her what she treasured the most in this life, and put her in this role of sainthood, testing her and the world at the same time. But it seems like such a cruel method, and she doesn’t want to believe that a god would be so happily throwing away its own people. She doesn’t want to believe there’s any higher purpose to her being here – she wants to believe that just wanting to help is enough to justify her presence, or others’ acceptance of her.

She looks at Mother Giselle glistening eyes, as she speaks of her faith, and she knows it’s just wishful thinking, for sure. So she picks up her daggers, gathers her usual teamp, and goes once more on her quests for more power and more influence, more and more.

* * *

She is tired, hungry and dirty. Ever since they put together their first camp in the Hinterlands, neither her hair nor her clothes had felt the sweet relief of warm water and soap, and it’s been a couple of weeks already. Not only is the area humongous, place after place added to a map that spreads more and more over the table that her captains bend over, but the mages and Templars war is only one of the many threats plaguing it. Bandits and religious cults and organized criminal trade, all blended in with some good old elven magic, berserk lyrium and sacred artefacts and you’ve got the recipe for a very beaten-down Herald.

No wonder people do not believe in her and their institution, when they’re scrambling so hard just to survive. An arrow passes by her head, gets stuck in the neck of the man she was fighting against, who falls to the ground with a strangled noise.

“I doubt that’s the last of them,” Varric says, putting his weapon away, as she searches the pockets of the fallen bandit.

“Thanks, Varric. You really know how to make a girl feel special.”

He grins back at her, and Cassandra makes a disgusted noise, wiping the sweat off her brow, leaving behind a dirty streak. The last of Solas’ healing magic pulses at their muscles, and she gets ready for the waves of pain, to feel her actual pain unmuted by magic. Maker, she’s so tired.

They meet Mihris near the entrance to the cave, fighting against a shade. Trevelyan is just happy that there’s only one, the Fade thin, but not shredded enough to create a rift. She’s searching for the elven artefact that Solas mentioned, so it makes sense that they should look for it together. It certainly sounds worth investigating.

She’s mourning that, in-between her good teachings, no one ever thought that Elven would come in handy during her life, because she’s sure Solas will never translate his conversation for the rest of them. and neither Mihris will mention exactly what their companions told her. The velfire is just as creepy as anything else stuck in the fade: a memory of a flame that burns in this world only where the veil is thin. She hopes that when it’s her time to go, she won’t have any part of her stuck in the Fade. She’s had her fill of it already.

And yet, she trusts Solas, and his immense knowledge. It’s impossible for one person in the Inquisition to know everything about everything, and so his presence is as essential as that of Cullen training their army, as Leliana gathering spies and secrets, as Josephine speaking beautifully. She has no qualms about asking him to intervene in getting the artefact, exactly because she knows he is the better trained person to figure out its purpose.

Rather than being scared or disgusted at the power that he yields through magic, she is just fascinated. The possibilities of it are endless, and there is much threat in that, but equal opportunities. And if even Cassandra can see that, when one evening in the camp she seriously says _your position is a honourable one, and well earned,_ then there’s much quality in having someone like Solas to call their companion.

Only after they set up all the six big camps for the Inquisition’s forces to get a foothold all across the Hinterlands, do they return back to Haven properly. There’s so much grim under her armour, that Trevelyan almost plunges into the snow for a made-up bath. Instead she grabs at a messenger’s arm, asks for any news or letter, receives his shake of the head instead. Cassandra wants to call her name, but she passes by, furious at her parents for making her wait, furious at herself for still waiting.

“See you at the council room in an hour,” she throws over her shoulder, and moves towards her room, prepares a pot of snow to melt over the fire, for a bath. She asks Harrit to tweak one of the armours she picked in the Hinterlands, because she is not sure the last one can keep up with their battles anymore, or have its stains ever removed. She stops by the tavern just enough to grab half a loaf of bread. She spends maybe a bit too much time on washing and brushing her hair, her semblance of normality and calm in the one braid that she knots together at her back.

She feels more human when she enters the Chantry again, though more rattled by the small conflicts appearing here and there, between the Templars and mages in their own ranks, fuelled by the hate in the Chancellor’s words, in his presence at all. She’d like to throw him out, nothing but a random cleric that’s all bark and no bite, a rat using up their own resourced to be kept fed, only to have the power to complain about their mere existence. She is starting to understand her father’s tantrums at nearby nobility, or how their new task is supposed to be filled with such people.

The rest of the advisors are already waiting for them, and she is glad to see that she’s not the only one who took some time for hygiene, Cassandra’s shirt a new one, her short hair still wet. She drops over one of the chairs, head spinning just a bit with the sudden movement, with how in need of a good sleep, good meal or good coffee she is. She blinks once, hard, focuses on the candlelight – as Cullen moves figurines across the table, updating it according to Leliana’s reports.

Josephine clears up her throat. “Mother Giselle is right; the people should see the Herald for more than just the rumours. Having her address the clerics is not such a terrible idea.”

Everyone in the room erupts at the same time, agreeing and disagreeing at the same time.

“I will go with her,” Cassandra steps in, and now the only one daring to say something back is Leliana, though Cassandra looks at the map on the table, at the calculations scrambled over several pieces of paper, and they all understand what this is actually about before she even continues her idea.

“What choice do we have, Leliana? Right now we cannot approach anyone for help with the breach. Use what influence we have to call the clerics together, once they are ready, we will see this through. We must convince the Chantry to permit us entry into the city so we can show them the Herald of Andraste is not the monster they believe.”

Easier said than done. But after all, what choice do they have? As long as the Chantry publicly works and speaks against the Inquisition, there will be no possible alliances, and most noble houses will avoid any connection with the organization. They’re already struggling as it is, to give enough supplies to their soldiers, to feed all the people in their ranks, to provide for all the refugees seeking their help. If they can make all of it just a tiny bit easier, then they must hone their words and swords and travel to the capital city of Val Royeaux.

* * *

“Did I tell you I hate this city?” she murmurs next to Varric, at the entrance to the city, as she feels the stares of the people around her at the back of her neck.

He snickers next to her, but it’s broken by a woman’s scream, as everyone else scrambles away in a panic once it dawns on them exactly who the colourful group is. One person trips, brushes past her shoulders, and for a brief second, she makes eye-contact with them, the horror so profound despite the mask they’re wearing, and she feels her skin crawling.

“Just a guess, Seeker,” he calls out to Cassandra, walking a few feet ahead of them. “but I think they all know who we are.”

“Your skills of observation never fail to impress me, Varric,” she sighs.

The only one welcoming them is one of Leliana’s spy, updating them on the situation in the city. There shouldn’t be anything surprising in the Chantry being together with the Templars, if the latter weren’t stuck in a war already, supposedly to have other priorities.

“People seem to think the Templars will protect them from… from the Inquistion.”

But Trevelyan isn’t blind; she caught the way the spy looked her over for a brief second, and knew its meaning.

“From me, you mean.”

She’s glad she decided to wear the leather gloves today, Mark hidden underneath it. More of a mere human, and less of a religious herald. Whatever these people understood from the events that spread throughout the entire Thedas, Trevelyan is not so certain she will be able to change their minds. She knows from her own experience that the strongest believers are the most resilient to change. Her showing up, wearing their saint’s name like only she owns it, will do nothing to make them have more faith in her.

It doesn’t help that the city is still mourning, bells going off at all hours of the day or the night; those suffering are most eager to find someone to point their finger at. She’d like a bit of respite, maybe just half an hour – disappear for a bit inside the Chantry, pray for her dead brother properly, light a candle in his memory. But that’s a luxury that she cannot have, especially, especially not after becoming the Herald.

There’s already a small audience gathered in front of the Mother, though if it’s curiosity or belief, she cannot tell, especially here in Orlais. As soon as she steps in the market, a finger points at her.

“Behold the so called Herald of Andraste. Claiming to rise where our beloved fell. We say this is a false prophet! No servant of anything beyond her selfish greed.”

More words put into her mouth, and now she cannot chew them down, swallow them whole, and her throat constricts with the indignation at such lies being presented as irrefutable truth. She tries though, to say the right words, in the right way, wills her voice not to weaver in front of anyone, puts a bit of her noble voice in it.

“I am simply trying to close the Breach. It threatens us all!”

Cassandra pushes forward, comes to stand next to her.

“It’s true! The Inquisition seeks only to end this madness before it is too late.”

Relief washes over her: here is someone with so much blinding faith in the purpose of their organization, that they might actually have a chance.

“It is already too late.”

_No_ , Trevelyan thinks, her hand pulsing and itching with the remains of unclosed rifts, her head hurting with the absence of a memory, a phantom pain of something she doesn’t remember owning in the first place. _It’s only the beginning._ She wants to scream, frustrated. How come no one else sees something that is so obviously true? Whatever the Conclave was, it was only the start – and whatever is to come, must for certain be bigger and worse than that, for it was only a failed attempt.

For a brief moment, as the Templars come up, she thinks this is it. The Templars will just fight them, win by numerical power, and their organization shut down, the war fought to its very end, the breach swallowing up the entire world in the end. Instead, the Lord Seeker simply strikes down the revered Mother, announces his own plans to gather power, and refuses to hear out anyone else. Trevelyan feels like she is a patron at one of Orlais’ absurd theatre, for all she knew about real life up to this point has been once again turned upside down.

Cassandra still tries, because she is Cassandra so of course she does.

“Creating a heretical movement, raising up a puppet as Andraste’s sent. You have shown me nothing, and the Inquisition… less than nothing. You should be ashamed of yourself. If you came to appeal to the Chantry, you are too late. The only destiny here that demands respect is mine.”

A young Templar at his side intervenes, eyes going from his superior to the members of the Inquisition in a panicked dance.

“But what if she is really chosen by the Maker? What if – “

“You are called to a higher purpose. Do not question.”

And so, they leave. But it’s that last sentence that sounds so familiar to the young lady. She’s been spoon-fed the same idea ever since she was young, reproached with it at each question that had no immediate explanation. If the Lord Seeker is trying to keep the people in his ranks together with that type of mantra, then he will most likely have many non-believers in his midst, or at least enough to question if there are better things to be found somewhere else. If Lucius won’t be reasoned with, then there are surely others in the Order who don’t feel as he does.

And yet, something about the descriptions about him – and his actions now, doesn’t really sit well with the Herald. If he was truly a power-hungry man, then for sure he would have raised to this rank earlier in his life, or at least shown signs of ambition earlier in his ruling.

“Do you think red lyrium might be involved?” she asks, mainly Varric, though she is sure everyone else is also familiar with the Kirkwall story. She remembers those days turned to weeks turned to months, when the Order was in such hectic panic, that her brother couldn’t visit home at all until things calmed over. How scared she was, next to her mother, that her own brother’s addiction might have fallen down the same path.

“Couldn’t really tell, but it’s definitely a theory worth taking into consideration.”

She nods at the answer, turns around so that she can help the revered Mother up. Even if she knows the older woman probably won’t accept it, she stills picks one of her potions and holds it out to her. The woman is bitter and judging, but more than anything else, defeated. Not only have the Templars she was supposed to rely on made a show of abandoning the Chantry and the city, but now the only mercy and understanding she gets is from the underdog organization that she was trying to destroy just a few moments before.

Trevelyan smiles down at her.

“Just tell me one thing,” the Mother says, now helped by other clerics back to her feet. “If you do not believe you are the Maker’s chosen, then what are you?”

“Someone who can help close the breach and end this madness.”

It’s the only still standing truth of her life.

“That is… more comforting than you might imagine.”

“You’re obviously sceptical. What do _you_ believe I am?” She cannot hide her bitterness.

“Our Divine, her Holiness, is dead. I have seen evidence for everything _except_ what would comfort me. For you to be true, a great many things must be false. If you are false, a great many things must have failed.”

The strongest believers are the most resilient to change, of course. But just because the world has been the same during one’s entire life, that does not mean it cannot change. And how easily so many things have blown out like a candle, when the Temple of Sacred Ashes blew up. There is a lot of chaos ahead, for all of humanity – and everyone’s fate is sadly just in the hand of the Maker now. But before the terror comes to all, if there is something that can be done to stop it, then it must be done.

It’s such an obvious, but rare thinking, that when the merchant Belle offers her help, the Herald almost refuses because she is suspicious. So far, almost all the people she interacted with have been more concerned with other matters, than the obvious, glaring gap in the sky. She turns towards Cassandra, asks for her input. _I believe she asks you, not me._

Yes, because she is the Herald. But the Inquisition is running on the everyday decisions of way more people than just the Herald of Andraste, and she would have been dead long ago by stress alone if it would have been any different. And yet, there’s something about the bitter, vicious way in which Cassandra said those words, that Trevelyan wonders, if maybe, the Seeker wouldn’t prefer her title instead.

“We need good people,” she tells Belle, and writes a short message for her to show to Cullen when she arrives there, for easier access and a good place to set down.

“I don’t know if I am that, but it will be nice to see.”

An honest Orlesian, _well if that ain’t a surprise_ , she thinks, and just as she is about to leave – an arrow passes by her, missing her cheek by millimetres only. She reads over the note, and turns around to her companions, holding it in-between her fingers. She grins at Varric, a tired thing.

“See? This is why I don’t like Val Royeaux.”

Somehow, from the second you stepped into the city, someone knows your name, your travel purpose, your past, your alliances and where to find you at all times of the day and the night. Some proceed like this mysterious arrow shooter, secret notices in dubiously empty places of the streets. Others prefer flair and style, and send official invitations, much like Madame Vivienne.

Since they are here anyway, they might as well chase down the red handkerchiefs, and attend a dinner party and escape mercenaries sent to kill her before she becomes an even bigger thorn in someone’s side. Trevelyan looks down at her attire, and knows she is about to become the laughing stock of the city for the next month, at least. Orlais is not forgiving even to most religious of the holy figures. And having people wanting to kill her is not a nice feeling, not at all. The fights in the Hinterlands were less about who she was, and the political machinations that come with that, and more about the muscle-memory want and need to remain alive in a battle. She cannot believe she is already missing that place.

Sera is a storm of a woman; not only an incredibly skilled shooter, but absolutely rampant in her speech and actions as well. She is entirely unlike any other young woman Trevelyan has ever met in her life, but it’s the freshness of her that eventually makes her smile at all that speech about breeches.

The blonde lowers her bow, scrunches her nose.

“You’re kind of plain, really. All that talk, and then you’re just…. a person. At least you do the whole glowing thing, right?”

The Herald sheathes her daggers, removes one of her gloves, to prove to this rogue, in the simplest way possible, that she is indeed the woman that the rumours keep talking about. But in fact, she does it out of gratefulness. In the midst of all the people that already know her as this holy figure, she’s had no time to consider herself normal again. And yet here Sera is, first time looking at her, and calling her _plain_. It’s what she has been all her life, really no noticeable feature on her face, a kind of washed-up beauty fitted more for dark portraits than real life attraction, and yet so many people threw away the commonness of her appearance in favour of the blessings the Maker supposedly bestowed upon her, something that she indignantly fought against at each turn.

If someone as scared of the Breach can judge the Herald so clearly, then she is clearly needed in their ranks. Trevelyan feels the acute need to have someone who can look at her, and see beyond the allegations of the faithful – and Sera is the closest thing she has to that, now, even if her eyes glint in a particular way each time she stares at her hand. Then, her arguments are also irrefutable. Even in their own ranks, it’s impossible to know all the people that pass through their camp, and it takes only one low level desperate servant to take apart a month’s worth of work.

Solas shifts at her back, not entirely pleased at the erratic speech or all over the place fighting style of this elf in front of them. But as Cassandra said, they don’t have any real choice – and anyone who is willing to help, is more than welcome. So Sera leaves for Haven, just as the rest of the gang waits for the party to start.

Trevelyan immediately grabs at a drink, no other way to get through an Orlesian party than at least a little bit tipsy – especially as her companions had to stay behind at an inn, invitation extended only to her. Cassandra almost tied her to a chair in an attempt to keep her from going, but Varric helped her see the potential in this partnership, if it was truly extended in true. What’s a bit of life risking, when they could gather the resources of a well-standing mage tied with the Orlesian nobility and one of the last standing Circles, invaluable to their battles and influences?

Still, an Orlesian party is the worst of social gathering, what with their masks hiding their facial expressions, the airy accent in their voices, the way their insults are never spoken like such, so there’s no way you can act offended. Her second brother is somewhere in the city, playing the Game, and she cannot understand what in the Maker’s name he finds interesting at a bunch of political and personal issues being passed around in gossips and love-making.

Of course, usually people in Val Royeaux are never so fast in helping her out. And while the Marquis’ words are indeed offending, he hasn’t done much worse than anyone else she has meet this entire day – so she is ready to brush it off, just as the man is frozen in place by Enchantress Vivienne. The woman is elegance and poise and beauty all in one, and the Herald finds herself taken aback by her presence. She’s also obviously incredibly powerful, both in magic and politics, to have made such a scene, even at her own party, and have none of her guests panic in any way.

She allows the Marquis his life, because really, it’s not like his words were harsher than others’, and follows Vivienne to a more secluded place, to talk. She moves her hands at her side, feels the hilts of her daggers, takes comfort in that, even if she knows she would have been dead already, if Vivienne wanted it.

It’s impossible for the other woman not to know that she talks with a daughter of a Trevelyan, and yet she remains true and proud in her being a mage, and in the places she has reached thanks to that.

“Not all mages have forgotten the commandment, that magic exists to serve man.”

And indeed, what better time to serve, than when the Breach is threatening mankind as a whole? But Trevelyan looks at this gorgeous and deadly woman, who probably has whatever she wants at the tip of her finger, and cannot imagine her in Haven, in the midst of all that chaos and dirt.

“What’s in it for you?”

Vivienne’s expression darkens. “The chance to meet my enemy, to decide my fate. I won’t wait quietly for destruction.”

Isn’t this what all of them are doing, one way or another? And yet, how much courage and pride to actually acknowledge it, deep to the rawest part of it.

“We’ll see each other in Haven then,” the Herald says, curtsying before turning around and leaving the estate, to relay the news to her people.

* * *

When they arrive, they move directly into a council. Leliana’s spies sent word ahead of their actions in Val Royeaux, but even if they were already aware of the situation, it seems like the advisors have not reached a common ground in the Templar-mages war. Each side is equally powerful and desperate now, and with the Chantry on the brink of falling apart, the Inquisition is the only faction that can still intervene in-between the two of them. The balance is weighing, uncertain in the air, and there’s no side heavier than the other, just yet.

And what’s more troublesome is that all Grey Wardens vanished – and Leliana asking for her help in the matter is a certain sign of things going wrong. If the people working with their spy network, one spread all across Thedas, cannot find a hint as to what is going on with that order, then the issue must be very suspicious indeed.

“Ordinarily, I couldn’t even consider the idea they’re involved in all this, but the timing is… curious.”

Trevelyan shivers under Leliana’s hand, where she stopped and held her close to whisper of her suspicions, and after all _who is not involved in all of this, now?_

Growing up in a noble household, and one that also prides itself on its religious beliefs, the want to help is somewhat rooted in her upbringing. When Cremisius Aclassi hovers at the entrance to the Chantry, she stops to ask him what his purpose in being here is in the first place. The Inquisition isn’t seeing people in such fine armour every day. Though, true to her noble status, she is also annoyed at the fact that after days of the poor guy trying to reach someone in the organization to listen to him, he somehow ended up to her as well. And yet, the Chargers don’t sound quite that bad. There’s no shame in paying for your help, especially if it’s as good as Cremisius makes it up to be.

“We are loyal, we’re tough, and we don’t break contracts. Iron Bull wants to work for the Inquisition. He thinks you’re doing good work.”

Trevelyan looks around her, at the constant bustling of Haven, at all of her people going about their duties, and realizes that maybe this praise is actually well-deserved.

“What about this Iron Bull?”

She gets the impression that this man in front of her loves to talk, and is honest in his words – especially if he can go on and on about people he’s known for year, who fought by his side and who saved his life more times than he can remember. The cheer and admiration in his voice is so noticeable, that she burns with curiosity by the end of it. The guy surely knows how to sell his job.

“Best of all, he’s professional. We accept contracts with whoever makes the first real offer. You’re the first time he’s gone out of his way to pick a side.”

Well, that’s surprising. Lately, it’s been her having to chase down allies.

“I look forward to meeting this Iron Bull.”

She moves away before he has time to say anything else. She’s pressed by time; she’d like a change of undershirt before she reads over the records from the Storm Coast and visits the place herself.

* * *

The sea back at home is calm, and the sun is gentle on most days, the smell of sand and spices filling the air near the open market. The sea on the Storm Coast is an angry, bellowing monster – and the Herald takes no comfort in being present here. The rain falls in such a heavy curtain that it almost hurts where it hits her bare skin, at the nape of her neck and over her hands, and she is immediately miserable and cold. She feels like one of the kittens her brothers loved so much to torment by dunking them in rain buckets. Harding attempts to smile at her, and she’s such a pretty sight.

“Enjoy the sea air. I heard it’s good for the soul.”

Again, Trevelyan wants to say, it’s the sea back at home that always calmed her heart, not this tempest raging on and on, unmerciful. She is glad she decided to go with her lightest armour, because anything heavier would have had her toppling over once wet. And yet, despite being entirely uncomfortable, and despite having her discomfort so obvious to her companions, her interest is stronger, as she considers exactly what the Chargers are capable of.

Bull ducks from an incoming attack, lips pulling into a smirk as he hears the battle growing in numbers, his guests finally making their appearance. When he rises, axe held up ready for a blow, his enemy falls to his feet, and in the blink of the eye, where before there was nothing but air, the Herald of Andraste appears, dressed in blood and looking up at him with the widest eyes he’s ever seen. She looks determinedly torn. Her instincts always at war with her reason, and it seems like she is walking, talking, _breathing_ on eggshells, trying to maintain the balance of her inner self, even as she slashes at the guy’s throat, keeps an eye on her people all the while as they take down another smuggler.

For a moment, as she straightens herself back up, the Herald of Andraste looks like she’s on the brink of collapsing. Then she sheathes her daggers, carefully wiping off the blood on her pants, pushes away the hair falling into her face, braid coming undone in the midst of fighting, and there’s an easier air about her.

“Nice one, Chuckles!” he can hear one of her companions addressing her, and he’s storing that nickname for a later time, but since both of them are busy assessing the other, none turns.

She’s not scared, he realizes. Her pupils are blown open, but it’s just the excitement from the battle still bursting in her veins. She stares at him, but she does not shy away from meeting his eyes, and there’s no second where her gaze strays anywhere else but his face or his weapon.

_Smart girl_ , Bull thinks.

He can notice there’s already a strain forming in her neck, from looking up at him, and he grins. She barely reaches his chest, just a tiny frail human – exhausted from fighting, probably not as well-fed as she should be.

“So you’re with the Inquisition, huh? Glad you could make it. Come on, have a seat. Drinks are coming.”

“You are the Iron Bull.”

There’s something in her voice that he doesn’t know where to place exactly, so he pushes it to the side. She’s really quite plain, as far as women go. There are many mingled stories in her body language, but whatever she’s managed to rewire, her manners are not one of those things – as she takes a seat as far away as possible from him on the tree trunk, head nodding politely in Krem’s direction when he comes up to proclaim his job already finished.

Yet, the Bull wants more time with this holy figure of the Inquisition’s. “I don’t want any of those Tevinter bastards getting away. No offense, Krem.”

“None taken, least a bastard knows who his mother was. Puts him one up on you Qunari, right?”

Bulls laughs, warmly, and the Herald wonders how much history exactly do these two share to be so comfortable passing around offences like the kindest of words. She is reminded of her brother’s favourite sayings; one he would always mention whenever he’d refer to the other Templers as his other siblings: Constant companionship is the strongest sign of affection. These two, with nothing in common and all the possible reasons to hate each other, instead choose, each day, to fight by each other’s side, to listen to one another and honour their bond above anything else.

She burns with yearning.

“So, you’ve seen us fight. We’re expensive, but we’re worth it… and I’m sure the Inquisition can afford us.”

“How much?”

“It wouldn’t cost you anything personally, unless you wanna buy drinks later. Your ambassador – what’s her name – Josephine? We’d go through her and get the payment set up. The gold will take care of itself. Don’t worry about that. All that matters is we’re worth it.”

Trevelyan thinks of the Inquisition’s coffers, not much over the sum the Iron Bull asks in there. But as much as they’d be lacking, she’s sure with such a mercenary company in their ranks, they’ll replace the coin in no time – and she can’t even imagine how easier they’ll go through missions and demands with fighters just _that good._

“The Chargers seem like an excellent company.”

Cassandra, from a distance away, looks like she’s about to have a seizure, no doubt having made the same calculation as the Herald to what Krem told her, but coming to a way different conclusion. Varric laughs in the background.

“They are. But you’re not getting the boys. You’re getting me. You need a frontline bodyguard, I’m your man. Whatever it is – demons, dragons? The bigger the better.”

It’s been weeks since she’s felt at ease on a battlefield, but just one shout from the Iron Bull, his lance high in the air, put most of her worries at ease. He is a man who obviously knows what he is doing when he fights, and this is exactly the type of people she desperately needs during her missions. She’d stand behind him in front of anything, and although it should scare her how willing she is to entrust her life over to someone she has just met, she is just _so_ tired of coming close to dying in each of her battles, of struggling so hard to bring down men bigger than her, or fear for her life even as she walks on an evening stroll. Iron Bull, acting as her bodyguard in all Inquisition matters, sounds like the best thing that has even happened to her since coming alive out of that damned blast.

Her shoulders sag in relief, there’s a breath of air that comes easier. He is everything she is not. She finds that the most incredible, best thing about him.

“There’s one other thing. Might be useful, might piss you off. Ever heard of the Ben-Hassrath?”

Trevelyan thinks back to her studies; when Qunari showed up in the Free Marches, on Kirkwall’s shores, her afternoon studies were almost immediately including Qunari culture and history as well, though at that moment she didn’t know she’ll ever need it, directly, like this.

“They’re a Qunari organization, right? The equivalent of their guards and city watch?”

An almost perfect quotation of her teacher, that she is painfully aware, now, was neither Qunari, neither travelled to Par Vollen.

“I’d go closer to spies, but yeah, that’s them. Oh, well, _us.”_

She appreciates that at least Iron Bull is obviously trying not to piss her off when choosing his words, his tone perfectly neutral, no stray expression on his face. It’s like she is listening to a report, and she cannot quite understand why a Qunari spy just admitted, outright, on their first meeting, to _being_ a Qunari spy tasked to do exactly what he is doing right now. She thinks of his offer, of how good it sounded –

“Whatever happened at that Conclave thing, it’s bad. Someone needs to get that Breach closed. So whatever I am, I am on your side.”

Is she okay with that _whatever_ being a spy? Is that promise, of him standing by her side and protecting her, enough to erase the fact that he is a trained spy? Is the okay with knowingly having reports sent about her actions and her choices and herself, about the Inquisition and its people – all of them that she just tentatively learnt to know? And does it make it better that she knows it from the start? That he’s been honourable enough to tell her from the beginning, just like that? And is their information valuable enough to get something equally as valuable from the other Qunari spies across Thedas?

The scale tips in her mind, from one side to the other, _yes_ and _no_ , getting heavier and heavier with each passing second, getting lighter and lighter with each of Bull’s arguments.

“Very well. You’re in.”

Bull smiles at this uncertain, poor woman in front of him, torn apart already by the expectations that her people put on her – and he is trying to calculate for how long is the Inquisition supposed to last like this. Whatever the humans call her, she is nothing but a terrified and overworked noble, who blushes prettily at the simple mentions of his preferences in redheads, who stares after the Chargers with something like jealousy on her face. Then the moment passes, and she starts moving, and there’s nothing of her past burden visible on her while she’s on the go, as she takes the trek back to the Inquisition’s camp, falling in row with the dwarf, nodding her head at Dalish.

She’s a figure who learnt of his secrets and chose to forgive him in advance and to trust him with no basis for it. Peculiar and desperate at the same time, lessons that he thinks she learnt only recently – no real noble would have agreed so easily, with so little coating.

He recalculates the odds of success, now that he is part of the Inquisition too.


	5. when we wonder why we bother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Qunari mercenary spy and a human noble walk into a bar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So.... it's been a while. *presents you this chapter that I wrote almost entirely in a trance-like state because I remembered it's been kinda long since the last update*  
> Song rec: Lorde - Sober II

They drink that night, after returning to Haven and getting the Chargers settled. That’s the first rule of negotiations: to break bread at the same table as your new ally, promise made but not entirely true until that moment when the first cup of wine sits on one’s lips, first sip taken, trusting it not to be poisoned. Of course, those are nobles’ fears and superstitions. She has no doubt that given the right reasons, the Iron Bull would simply strike her down: easier to deal with someone, if not necessarily cleaner.

But while she comes up with such scenarios, the Qunari seems entirely at ease, downing cup after cup of ale, laughing next to Krem, turning a bit to the side to glance at her from time to time. She tries to keep her expression levelled, not let the redness at the tip of her ears and across her cheeks to be read as anything but tipsiness. Just because she desperately wants to trust him, doesn’t mean she does so, not quite yet. For as much as she appreciates having him on their side, for now, she fears the time when they might stare at each other across a battlefield. And she knows she has seen only a shadow of what he is capable of: both as a warrior, and a spy, incredibly sharp and smart.

Trevelyan looks around the tables moved together into a corner, to fit all her people, and wonders how on earth did they manage to bring together such a capable, colourful band of experts: Sera shares a joke with Varric, as Cassandra frowns in her ale, suspicious enough to at least imagine that she’s the reason for their laughter. Vivienne looks like she doesn’t belong in here, with her delicate garments, and yet the banter she gets into with Iron Bull feels natural from the first second. Cullen is explaining something to Solas, looking dreadfully serious, all while Krem is caught in an animated conversation with Josephine and a few other Chargers.

Something in her chest booms with pride, that she somehow helped in creating this moment in time, this space for all of them. No one talks to her outright, lost in alcohol, but not forgetting her sainthood, and only the barmaid throws her a wink each time she refills her cup. From the other end of the room, Iron Bull catches her eyes again, and warmed by the fire burning in the fireplace and the drinks, her expression slips for a second, before getting up and retreating for the night. It was a weakness that didn’t feel like one, right then.

Iron Bull accepts the refill, grins at Cassandra just to piss her off, thinks how no one even noticed the Herald’s absence, or said their goodbyes to her as she left. No one questions or challenges her, no one looks after her – even as she’s the one that has to do the same thing for everyone else here. He tries to guess at her age: younger than him, almost too young to be made the symbol that stands between humanity and the end of the world. Yet, ever since they met, he has seen nothing holy in her, only in the gazes of her people.

Sainthood achieved by devotion. Obsession and prayers given as offerings to a reluctant goddess. Martyrdom expected and awaited from nothing but a lost girl. To not allow herself get swept up in all this commotion created by the breach and her Mark, she must either lack serious self-confidence or know herself too well.

Bull downs his drink in one go, shouts for another. The barmaid smiles prettily at him as she passes by.

The cheerful chats go on for much longer in the night, and Trevelyan lays awake in her bed, lulled by the faint sounds of it, but her mind reeling, considering the requests they’ve gone through during the afternoon’s council, thinking of how they can get supplies for the new wave of refugees that are on the way. She thinks they deserve a late start to the day in the morning, feels guilty because it might be a luxury that they cannot afford.

* * *

Despite falling asleep late, she’s up early, with a stiff neck from a bad night, and she swears when she gets out of her blanket only to be welcomed by the typical freezing cold of Haven. If she were back at home, today she would have gotten ready alongside her mother, being a holiday, and maybe that’s why she ends at the Chantry. Habits are hard to lose, especially ones that your entire family is built upon.

But she doesn’t pray, doesn’t want to anymore, even as the words sit at the tip of her tongue, even as her fingers itch to go and light a candle.

_She will know no fear of death, for the Maker shall be her beacon and her shield, her foundation and her sword._

However, in the middle of a battle, when you’re gasping for air, when you’re sure you’ll be dealt a final blow, or when your vision goes out just as the world turns louder and louder around you – she knows one is actually very afraid, knows one is not praying for light and a place by the Maker’s side, but for more life, for another chance, for more time. One sees their entire life flash before their eyes, and in that second, they want to grasp it all, multiply it tenfold, hold on to it, lay it at the feet of the Maker and say: _see, I deserve more_. Dying is as desperate and as ugly as it can get, and there’s no god that can make it less of that, even as those left behind pray for it.

No matter how much she prays, no matter how hard she believes, the dead cannot be brought back to life, or, anyway, not in any way that it matters, not in any way that doesn’t involve blood magic or demons or a blight. So then, what’s the point?

She thinks of her brother, and then she’s angry all over again at a supposed Maker that allowed his death to happen, that let so many go like that. She thinks of his belief, of how badly he wanted to do good as a Templar, or how he was the person who taught her her first prayer, and he only had to die to undo all that good she made her believe in. She hates being called the Herald, because there’s nothing more she’d like to do than throw away her religion and her Mark, even as she knows it’s pointless to wish to change the past.

When will she make peace with the fact that the world if unfair, and it hasn’t been this vicious to her just because she’s been a noble until now? When will she accept that her rage is just exhausting, and nothing more?

“Herald,” Vivienne greets from her side, and she startles like a thief caught in the middle of a robbery. “If you’re praying, I can- “

“No.”

Her answer is too immediate, too sharp, and she turns her back to the statue of Andraste, smiles at the mage. Vivienne is as gorgeous as always, and if the night before was in any way more hectic than her parties, she’s not showing it. She looks at the Mark, reaches out with her magic to test it, and it tickles at the tip of her fingertips, makes it hum and glow – a sight fascinating no matter how many times she sees it. For a mediocre fighter to now possess a magical power stronger than a First Enchanter, with no magic manifested ever before, is a miracle in and of itself, though Trevelyan is not willing to attribute it to anything but pure dumb luck.

“Tell me: why were you at the Divine Conclave?”

It’s a question dressed in prettier words, Vivienne’s experience with nobility showing, because Trevelyan knows that what she means is: _why you?_ There were the obvious political interests, and her mother’s choice that designed her at the ambassador of their house’s position. She has a brother on one side of the war, and she feared losing him even as she didn’t know it will hurt this badly to not have him anymore. She has heard the cries in Ostwick, from family of both mages and Templars alike, ever since the Chantry blew up in Kirkwall. She has barely missed being caught in too many fights on the streets, she heard the rumours that their guards were hiding apostates in their homes, that nobles welcomed back their children in their ranks, now that Circles fell around Thedas.

So she was there as a Trevelyan, just a representative of a name. But she knew what her brother was fighting for, behind the closed doors of negotiations, what Divine Justinia was hoping to achieve with the gathering in the first place.

“The war benefits no one. It must end.”

She thinks of their camps in the Hinterlands, now a mixture of those torn apart by war, villagers equally parts traumatized by lirium crazed fighting and spells blowing up everything to pieces. She thinks of all the bodies that they’ve found, burnt beyond recognition, houses abandoned, livelihoods forgotten behind just for a chance at life. She thinks of everyone who stepped in her path, crying and begging for a piece of their past, for a piece of their loved ones.

She doesn’t want to see something like it ever again.

“Mages, Templars, innocent people of all kinds now look to the Inquisition to decide their fate. Failure is a luxury that we cannot afford, my dear.”

Vivienne sounds calm, so she also tries to remain so, though her breathe is hitching in her throat and she’s starting to get dizzy. She doesn’t want someone to word out exactly what she’s fearing, like she doesn’t comprehend the gravity of the situation, like she needs guidance towards realization. She hates that Vivienne might have read her all right from the damn fucking start, and she breathes, slower, forcing herself to calm down because she doesn’t want to throw up all over Vivienne’s expensive heeled shoes, or her new boots that she looted off someone’s body in the Hinterlands.

“For almost a thousand years, the world believed ir was in the hands of the Maker. Now many believe you are the agent of His will. Whatever the truth, that belief gives you power.”

 _What a bunch of bullshit_ , she wants to say, but she knows she’s been allowed entry to Val Royeaux because of that belief, she knows she has an army, no matter how badly fed, because of that belief, she is part of the Inquisition at all because of that belief. And in those open doors, in those raised swords, in the allies she found – there’s her power.

She doesn’t want to use it, too scared, but she already did, just by surviving, and she’s now a piece in a chess game she doesn’t know against who they’re playing.

Vivienne is already not paying attention to her, returning to her desk, writing letters, inspecting the reports she’s received from Josephine. So her warning is more murmured, more an omen than an outright warning, though she knows it’ll hit where it matters anyway.

“If no one leads the way, many will be left in darkness.”

And the Herald knows, that as much rage as she is feeling, there is someone out there with more damage done to their families, with more responsibilities on their shoulders, with more grief in their hearts, failed by the world in ways that maybe she cannot even begin to comprehend. And she knows, that if her rage is true, then she has to fight to make sure that as many people as possible are protected from such pain. She hates that Vivienne read her all right from the damn fucking start. She hates that she knew exactly where to shove her, and in which direction – and if Trevelyan makes the Inquisition, then the Inquisition makes her just as much.

* * *

As she goes around Haven, writing down lists of needed supplies, marking on a map all the places that they need to scout, or where rumours are pointing at, talking with officers and soldiers, upgrading a piece of armour, training with Cullen and discussing best offers for various noble houses with Josephine, she starts noticing The Iron Bull. It’s impossible not to, as he easily towers above everyone else in the Inquisition’s ranks, and almost everyone naturally gets out of his way. When she marks Dane’s stables on her map and question one of the young helpers about the man, the Iron Bull borrows a sharpening stone for his axe from grumpy Harrit, one of the only persons that doesn’t seem at all phased by the presence of a Qunari in their camp. When she leaves a Council meeting in a late evening, Krem is dragging Bull in the tavern, looking outright comic with his arm around the Qunari’s shoulders, their laughter booming in the air.

Then, tentatively, because Bull has done her the favour of directly telling her about his status as a spy, she decides to just talk to him directly as well. Eyes to eye. First comes a morning training, as she goes through the moves with more recent recruits, that still are not familiar with her fighting style, whose moves she cannot guess just because they’ve been trained by Cullen, in a style too similar to her brother’s.

On the other side of the training ground, Cullen and Bull shout their orders to each of their troops, guiding their moves, correcting wrong stances, pushing those showing potential. Sometimes, the missed hits turn into reason for teasing from the others, or a joke is shouted instead of a scream as a soldier lunges for their opponent, and although everyone trains with all their might, there’s an air of comradery between them that makes it not seem much of a chore.

She stops first, head politely nodding at her partner, her skin still sweaty, adrenaline still making her head reel. She starts making her way across the yard, stopping by Bull’s side, waiting patiently for him to finish the drills, ask his lieutenant to take over. She’s staring at all these soldiers making up the Inquisition’s ranks when he turns towards her.

“They’ve got good form. Cullen’s putting his Templar training to good use.”

She crosses her arms, moves her weight so she’s just a tiny bit closer to him.

“Did Cullen tell you he was a Templar? He’s not wearing the armour.”

“He didn’t have to. Might not be a Templar shield, but it’s a Templar holding it. He angles the shield just a bit down. Helps direct fire or acid away, so it doesn’t spray right into your face. Qunari learn the same thing when we train to fight Tevinter mages. Your Templar’s doing good work.”

So that’s what his Ben-Hassrath training is capable of. She noticed the same thing, but it was the familiarity of it that made her notice it at all, and she’s impressed by how sharp he was to catch all those details, and piece together that much of the past behind them, and be so correct. Still, he’s true to his word, and he’s not only telling her his obvious conclusion, but also the thinking process that brought him to it – and she nods her head, looks again at the troops and sees something more this time around.

“I’m impressed by what Cullen has accomplished with the troops.”

Most of the people joined the Inquisition after the explosion at the Conclave, now refugees with a want to do something about this new problem that they’re all facing. Most of the older soldiers died when they closed up the Breach. Yet those standing in front of them are objectively _good,_ and it is all thanks to their commander. It takes time to build a group into a team, but these men gave their loyalty to Cullen, and that’s one important detail when getting ready to fight a religious war.

“Biggest problem for the Inquisition right now isn’t on the front line. It’s at the top. You’ve got no leader. No Inquisitor.”

She turns to stare at him, try and see if he is joking, but Bull looks dead serious, his eye searching her face, memorizing every change in expression – and she knows he’s doing it, and yet she cannot stop herself from looking as incredulous as she feels.

“Cassandra’s been the driving force of this Inquisition. She’s the leader in all but name.”

“Cassandra’s a Seeker. From what I gather, that’s a bit like a Ben-Hassrath.”

The hand – that gives, that takes, that beckons, that strikes. She has hand-picked each person in their ranks, has used the authority of her title and past to create this organization. No one would be here without her, so isn’t that the obvious choice? No matter how terrible their beginning together, no one can deny the fact that the Seeker is an incredibly capable woman.

So then, why not? She frowns up at the Iron Bull, and with him, she doesn’t even have to actually ask the question outright.

“She’s a good hunter and a great fighter, but she doesn’t see the big picture. Too busy searching for answers.”

And Cassandra has searched for answers all her life: about her family’s demise, about the path of a Pentaghast, about her faith, about the heroes of Thedas, about the rightfulness of her actions, about the divinity of her Herald.

“My people don’t pick leaders from the strongest, or the smartest, or even the most talented. We pick the ones willing to make the hard decisions… and live with the consequences.”

She doesn’t know enough about all of these people to figure out who would best suit his definition of a leader, barely having started to know them better, to fit in-between their orders and their skills. But as she thinks it over, she thinks it does make sense – especially as in these desperate times of need, so many people need others to make the hard decisions for them. No one wants to be the one having to bear the guilt of a choice, though everyone envies the laurels of praise that might come in good outcomes. But the balance is so delicately held together, and it so many times more tips towards destruction instead of success. The people just want someone to glorify, or someone to crucify. The Inquisition needs someone willing to wear both the glory and the condemnation.

It explains, however, how come he sits at the head of the Chargers. It explains, however, why he’s so proudly wearing his scars and his missing eye and why his people talk so highly of him.

As the silence lingers between the two of them, Bull breaks it.

“Ah, who knows. Maybe you seal the breach, the Chantry gets off its ass, and all those soldiers go home and get fat.”

She bursts out laughing, the 180 degrees switch in her thoughts and in the conversation making absolutely no sense, but pleased at the attempt to lighten up the situation anyway.

“You think?”

“It could happen. It won’t, but it could.”

She’s still laughing, a smile on her face, as she waves him goodbye, a messenger sent to get her for another meeting.

* * *

Then it’s when Leliana asks her to her tent, after Harding’s recent arrival to let them know of some scouting reports – but the surprising thing is that when she’s done, Harding is still around, sitting by the fire with a few of the soldiers, and Cremisius is next to her. When she’s warm enough, and fed well enough, she’s back on her scout duties, and the Herald takes the moment to occupy what was Harding’s seat just a few minutes ago, trying to smile at Bull’s man. He’s silently passing her a cup of tea, that she’s sincerely grateful for – no matter how much time she spends in the snow, she’ll never get used to the way her fingers go numb if she’s not wearing her gloves, probably forgotten in some meeting room.

She likes him because everything is straight-forward with him. He’s just a really good fighter that is part of a mercenary band that he cares about like no other, and it’s a loyalty and devotion that is obvious even from the way he speaks about them, the tone of his voice turning just a bit softer when he says the name of the people he entrusted his life with, over and over again.

So Trevelyan just goes for it: “I’d like to know more about The Iron Bull.”

“The Chief. First time I met him, he saved my life.”

Well, that’s one unexpected way of describing the Qunari leader of a mercenary group.

“That’s a story definitely worth hearing,” she pushes, sipping from her tea – and Cremisium maybe had figured out that she’s asking out of sincere curiosity, or he is just eager to tell the stories of their adventure together. One doesn’t simply become the most trusted man of a Qunari spy, and it’s not a title that many people can boast.

“I wasn’t a soldier at the time. I was in some trouble and trying to flee Tevinter. A Tribune and his men caught me in a border town tavern. They meant to make an example of me. Bull killed them. Gave up his eye doing it. He patched me up and asked if I was looking for work. I’ve been putting up with his jokes ever since.”

That last sentence grabs a smile out of the Herald, and Krem sits back more comfortably in his seat, pleased.

“That’s how he lost his eye?”

The eye patch is certainly the most unnerving and mysterious thing about Iron Bull. She heard the servants whisper in the tavern about it, and there are as many rumours about the story behind it as there are gossiping mouths in Haven. It probably doesn’t help that he’s a Qunari as well, and he automatically grasps the attention of everyone… well, across Thedas, really.

“Yes. The guards had me on the tavern floor when Bull came inside and yelled for them to stop. The guard had a flail. Bull put himself between me and the blow. Big horned idiot. Didn’t even know me.”

Krem’s voice turns soft, no bite in the offence, lost in the memory of that situation. Trevelyan thinks of the weapon, with its metal, spiked striking end, and how excruciatingly painful it must have been to get a blow in the face, losing an eye in the process. She doesn’t know why, but the fact that he hasn’t lost it in a gruesome battle, or while doing mercenary work, but simply trying to do the good thing and save the life of someone who didn’t deserve death, makes the outline of him in her mind switch.

“And about him being a Qunari, a-”

“A Ben-Hassrath?”

Trevelyan opens her mouth, closes it again, staring at this man defending his leader so fiercely, just by knowing a truth that she thought it should be a secret.

“I didn’t expect he’d tell you all that he was a spy.”

“Not the whole band, but those who’ve been around long enough to trust. He figures most of us would find out sooner or later, and it should come from him. It’s never messed up a job. He just writes letters back home. Lot of the boys write letters back home.”

She sits in silence, sipping at her tea, but no second feeling uncomfortable – her doubt not judged, his answers accepted. They’re just two people that care, in different ways, about the same person: one questioning and one defending. She considers his words and the information that she newly learnt, and how suddenly it makes Bull so much more than just a Qunari spy, or the leader of the Chargers.

If all her selves can exist inside of her, can it not be the same for everyone else around her as well? Cullen is a Templar, as well as just their commander, and a man trying to do right by his past mistakes. Cassandra is a Seeker and a Pentaghast and a warrior. Leliana is a spy master and a deeply religious person and a skilled, Orlais-trained assassin. Varric is a writer, a businessman, a spy and an adventurer. Josephine is the eldest daughter of the Montilyets, an ambassador and a tactician.

She thanks Krem for his time, and he grins at her.

* * *

It’s rare to eat lunch at all, as supplies are spare, so most of them are just keeping themselves busy until diner time. It’s even rarer to get to eat lunch, and when you do, to have it at the same time as other people. But as Trevelyan makes her way inside the tavern, she’s welcomed by the sight of Bull’s back, the musician tuning her mandolin, and a few of their recruits eating a very late breakfast, having woken up barely in time for their morning drills. It’s part manners and part want that makes her slide into the empty seat across Bull, at the same table.

“Hey Boss,” he says, and before she gets to, he gestures towards Flissa for one more bowl of warm soup, and he shoves the loaf of bread across the table, closer to her. She smiles, and she breaks apart a piece, starts eating it as it is, as she waits for her food. Bull has stopped eating his as well, and he waits as well.

“So, Iron Bull… How did you get the name ‘Iron Bull’?”

“I picked it,” he says simply, leans back a bit to allow space for the barmaid to place the new plate and cup on the table, before he returns, picking up his spoon at the same time as her. “We don’t have names under the Qun, just… I don’t know, job descriptions, I guess. When I came to Orlais, I chose ‘The Iron Bull’ for myself.”

She keeps her spoon between her lips as she pays attention to his words, a bad habit from her teenage years that she wasn’t able to get rid of, and so her question is somewhat muffled, makes her sound younger.

“But why specifically ‘Iron Bull’?

“This may surprise you, but I _really_ like hitting things.”

She snorts in her spoonful of soup, the blow of air making all the contents fly back into her bowl, and she’s laughing hard now, Bull joining her a second later. She’s up on her feet, grabbing one of Flissa’s rags, cleaning up at her chin and shirt, as Bull’s laughter dies out. If her mother could see her now, even she’d swear, but as it is, she’s just enjoying her mishap, and clearly her lunch partner is doing so as well.

“Also, it’s _the_ Iron Bull, technically.” He’s waving his spoon in the air to point at her in tandem with his accent falling on the word _the_. “I like having an article at the front. It makes it sound like I’m not even a person, just a mindless weapon, an implement of destruction… That really works for me.”

Well, she has seen him in a battle, he is all of those things, but she also knows there’s not a second he’s not aware of his people and how they are doing in a battle. He always jumps where the battle is heaviest and he’s incredibly scary swinging his axe around, a fastness in him that can’t seem possible for someone as large. And she also knows of Krem’s story, and how none of Bull’s actions can possibly be called, at any point, mindless or destructive. Heck, isn’t he here at all, tied to be her bodyguard and protect her in all Inquisition matters, just because he doesn’t want this whole world blown apart? But hearing it that he prefers it the other way around, she wonders what exactly she is supposed to believe at all.

So, she asks him about how he became a Ben-Hassrath instead. She knows parts of Qunari culture, just at a superficial level, nothing much but what every other Free Marcher put together during Arishok’s stay in Kirkwall. It starts at pure curiosity, though. Her world has been so narrow, and now it is getting wider and wider every day, with each piece of land walked, with each new ally that she recruits. She wants to be just to all of them, to thrown away the teachings of her family and the superstitions of her people.

She listens to his explanations, tries to piece it together with the book about the Qun that she asked Leliana to get her, that she found in the wares of the merchants she came across. Off the battlefield, even as he speaks of his people, Iron Bull is a refreshingly reasonable person, listening to everyone’s words with the same level of attention, attentively reading the gestures and expressions of those around him, and he replies in a calm matter that has nothing to do with his way of fighting. So even if he might be annoyed by her inquiries, he doesn’t show it.

They’re down only to the bread, that they’re now each grabbing a piece of as he keeps talking.

“They sent me to Seheron because they needed someone who could fight and hunt down problems. That whole island was a sack of cats. Incursions from Tevinter, Tal-Vashoth, and native rebels fighting both sides… And in the middle, me, trying to wrangle the rebels and restore order.”

If there is a place who can haunt a man for the rest of his life, then that place is Seheron.

“I can’t imagine that was easy.” She lets him take two pieces of the bread in a row.

“One day I woke up and couldn’t think of a damned reason to keep doing my job. Turned myself in to the reeducators. I thought about letting some rebel kill me, but I couldn’t give any of those bastards the satisfaction. The Ben-Hassrath ordered me to go to Orlais, ostensibly as a Tal-Vashoth, and work undercover. That’s how I ended up here.”

Trevelyan looks around, at the shoddy tavern that they’re in, with the food that always seems to have something missing, with their untrained soldiers, and with this one table that they’ve shared over the past half an hour.

“I’m glad you’re alive and; well, here, Bull.” It’s an intentional choice of words, and a one-word declaration: his name, but not its purpose. “If you ever need to talk more about all this, let me know.”

She offers even if she doubts he’ll ever take her up on it. Iron Bull gets up from the table, shouting his thanks to Flissa, before looking down again at this Herald, a young woman that is just extending her kindness to a man that she knows to be a trained spy and killer.

“Nah. It was a long time ago.”

* * *

And then there’s that time when a few days pass by with her locked in meeting rooms, counting once and twice and thrice and then over again all the supplies that they need for the Hinterlands once again. And the next time that she sees the Iron Bull, is as he sits outside his tent, when she finishes talking with master Harrit about the horses that he wants and the Inquisition desperately needs, and that she’s supposed to get from one of her treks in that damned place. Sometimes just the thought of doing something tires her out enough to make her want to stop, though stopping is a luxury that she cannot afford.

And yet, she takes five minutes to hover by Bull’s side, asking him some more things about Qunari. She cannot even imagine not knowing who her parents are, so much of her life hinges on her relationship with her family, and so much importance is placed by humans on their ancestors and links. Heck, the Trevelyans have an entire tapestry up on the wall in their main hall, showing their entire lineage, decades and decades ago, names that have gone out of fashion and names that have shaped the Free Marches and the Chantry and the Templar Order. And out of all of that, she was born to sit at the last end of all those familial roots: made and raised to be who she is, simply because she was a Trevelyan.

How can she judge him his religion and his loyalty for it, when she herself comes from a long line of believers, when her own version is stifling enough that it makes a holy figure out of a mere woman? There is so much she doesn’t know, or if she knows, she doesn’t understand – so it is with open ears and curious eyes that she listens to his stories and lessons, even if they challenge everything that she thought was supposed to be the natural order of things.

And how can she truly criticize the Qunari rules, when her own parents asked much of the same thing from her? There were always the things that they taught she’d be best at, the roles she was expected to fulfil – and that was the width of her life, with all the classes she was made to take to build her into the best image of a young lady, with all the unwritten and unspoken codes of conduct, with the fragile honour and egos. Life back in Ostwick was simply following a path that has existed for the women of noble houses for centuries, and much like a Qunari, they were all just expected to follow through.

People are just people, everywhere.

She likes him, because in his rebuttal of her beliefs, she understands that, for him, she’s nothing more than a bratty noble, and she wants to both weep and hug the life out of him for not even considering the idea that she might be holy. With all the others, she can feel when their perception shifts: that sometimes they cannot believe her survival or her Mark, so there’s only the heavens to blame; that sometimes they watch her train or they have to explain something to her, and they sigh in relief at her simply humane limitations. But with Iron Bull, she’s always just his boss – and he doesn’t seem to care to make more out of her.

And then, maybe because she’s reminded of her life before all of this, or maybe because Bull pauses to look after a redhead new recruit, or maybe because he has not refused to answer any of her questions yet, she asks him about _marriage_ and _love._ And hears about sex instead, her face turning redder and redder with each word out of his mouth, and Bull seems like he is enjoying both the topic of the conversation, the memories it’s bringing up, and the prude reactions from her. By the end, there’s a teasing edge in his voice, and Trevelyan is covering half of her face with the pair of gloves she’s holding in her hands, while glaring at him above them.

“You asked, Boss!” he shouts after her, when she comes up with an excuse, stumbling over her words, and she just screams back at him that he better be ready for the Hinterlands from tomorrow onwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's!! Good to be back! Hope everyone is doing well, life has been hectic (cases in my country are on the rise, I recently lost my job bc of the pandemic and I'm trying to start grad school in fall *sighs*) and I'm sorry this chapter is not necessarily interesting, but I've been dreading writing it for so long (because how can I start and try to do justice to this duo I really love??) and at this point, I just want it out into the world.  
> And no, I have no idea how I managed to write almost 6k of literally nothing but introspection happening.
> 
> Reminder that I have [tumblr where you can reach me](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/brdweidrems13), and I've also created [a pinterest board for my Inquisitor!](https://ro.pinterest.com/persephonn/dragon-age-the-inquisitor/)


	6. after the war is won, there's always the next one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s seen her bleeding. In her delirious mutterings, half frozen to death, she was more human than all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter: Landon Austin - Armor

It’s unnerving, that some people would turn to worshipping a rift, building a cult around the soft glowing of that hole in the sky, even if no demon is dropping through just yet. Fear can do many things, it can make one believe many impossibilities, but to adore and dedicate yourself to what might as well bring the end of the world is something she will never be able to understand.

“Even if it’s done in the hopes of appeasing it…” she murmurs, mainly to Solas, mostly to herself.

These people are on their knees, praying to the source of her nightmares. It scares her more to stay the night between them than between the wild animals in the mountains. She finds agents for the Inquisition in their rank; purposeless as she imagines she might have been, if their fates were reversed.

She has no way of knowing if, without the Mark bestowed upon her, she would have picked anything different but this place, or the immense grief of those separated from their most loved. Some days, she finds it difficult to move on even when she has the faith of Thedas as incentive.

The Herald closes their rift too, eventually. And their reverent, desperate eyes and pleas turn towards her.

“This will never get any easier, will it?” she asks once away, blissfully happy in the companion of her own party.

“Probably not,” Varric agrees, and she’s grateful it’s the truth even if it’s not what she would have liked to hear.

She closes rifts, yes – but this young woman is doing way more than that, in her days-long walks through the Hinterlands. Really, for someone with a glowing green hand, there’s really not much of it at all, Bull thinks. They gather supplies, return family heirlooms to desperate survivors, hunt so they can feed their ranks.

Even as she is one of the highest standing people in the ranks of the Inquisition, she goes out of her way, time and time again, just so she can help random people that they encounter, or to bring peace to people whose loved ones they just got killed in the middle of a fight. Most are nice and grateful, but there are enough times when she’s met with contempt or outright hate, and yet no matter which one it is, she seems unaffected. She takes it all as it is, and just pushes forward, even if she lets herself slip by her body stiffening, or a tighter hold on her weapons, a strain in her expression. It’s little things, but he has no doubt that he, or Varric even, can pick it up easily enough.

She gets better every day, though. Maybe because she allows herself a break from it from time to time, in late evenings when they pull their tents out and have a fire warming up. He makes hot chocolate – and blows their socks off, though he thinks Solas will never agree to calling `good` anything coming from a Qunari. He compliments Varric’s books, which he read on too long voyages. Trevelyan, blushing and unable to look at him, asks him all prettily to borrow some volumes to read in the evening, and he has to bite his mouth from inviting her to re-enact some of the… smutty scenes.

He has noticed, though he knows she didn’t quite yet. That whenever she’s overwhelmed, she looks at him for support in a battle. That she checks him out always afterwards, seeking wounds. That something in her eyes changes sometimes, when she catches herself staring at him when she certainly shouldn’t.

Bull doubts a noble from a house with religion as tradition knows how to recognize _lust._ Which makes it all the more fun to see it bloom all over her, as time passes. He will allow her all the time she needs, he will even let her bad innuendos and terrible attempts at flirting pass. He has messengers to catch behind tents for a quickie, and lost servant ladies showing off their teats for him – all burning with the need and curiosity for someone big and exotic.

He gives in to them, and not to the Herald for one simple reason: he hasn’t yet quite figured out what to give in exchange to her, because he knows with her, the sex is just not _it._ For her, the sex is just the means, not the purpose – and so he moans and grunts and spills himself in other bodies, teases and bites and licks against other skins, sated and satisfied. And all the while, she ends up more and more wound up, taut like a rope, beautiful and scared, exhausted and giving.

Who gives her… well, anything?

Most people everywhere have a system that works best for them. From what he gathered, even her old system wasn’t really working for her; and now she’s left looking around her, piecing together something new, but not quite whole. He should probably despise her for it, for the aimless conduct of her being, and yet he can’t help but be at least a little bit impressed for the fierceness with which she pushes forward, even if it’s desperate.

Desperate people can achieve many, many things. So he watches, silent.

There are some things that hit her more than others. The note in the Carta hideout makes her dizzy; she has to hold on to the table and urge her head to calm down.

_Some rich Marcher they’re claiming was sent by Andraste. Zealous nugshit, if you ask me. Just a brat wanting a new title so she can win the noble pissing match back at home._

She fights almost in hysterics, sticking her daggers in darkspawn, continuing stabbing long after they stop moving, rushing ahead down stairs and already panting and heaving with effort against the enemies by the time the others turn the corner.

She’s not rich; she hasn’t seen a coin since taken by the Inquisition, and she wear a _dead man’s breastplate._ She’s been refusing the Andraste rumours since she first woke up after the Conclave, and yet each day is just another one of her against divinity. She’s never even been taken serious in the noble politics of her home, and she’s been nothing more than a womb pushed around between houses at her father’s request. And she’s so incredibly hurt that, despite the truth of her life, she’s nothing but what that piece of paper said in the eyes of anyone else but those already by her side.

On the way, she picks up Blackwall, because of course she does, and because Red especially asked. The man is good enough with a sword, and his words are pretty – good enough that the Herald is fooled, but Bull is not so convinced. But she picked Sera this time around, and so there’s no somewhat-spy Varric to confirm it with, and Blackwall joins their ranks.

Trevelyan actually likes him, because he offers her thanks and apologies, and calls her wonderful things and he holds himself with an elegance and self-confidence that she hasn’t seen since Ostwick, mostly because most here has been too young and too exhausted. Blackwall comes with the fame of his order, and the respect and kindness she gives him comes as natural extension of that.

“You didn’t have to, yet you took the time and effort to help me,” he says, and she’s already smiling.

“Anything to further the Inquisition’s power.”

“You are a formidable woman, my lady. I hope to never cross you. Perhaps it’s safer to show admiration from afar.”

She blushes, stares at her shoes unsure of what exactly she should say, hand pushing her hair behind her ear. She cannot even remember the last time someone acknowledged her as a lady; and Blackwall is probably the first person to actually… believe she’s also a good fighter, not just a great symbol, or promising potential. He seems to see her as good enough as she already is, not only as what she can be.

“Leliana makes sure to keep the sordid secrets away from the public eye.”

She only half-jokes. Besides her name, there’s not been much reaching the rumours mill, or anyway, nothing they didn’t want there in the first place.

“Well then. I won’t pry. I prefer to go on believing only good things about you.”

_Ah_ , she thinks, _there it is._ Just because she’s not an amazing deity-like figure, doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist as someone better than she is inside his head; it’s just that he sees her as a woman, instead of a herald. Even like that, she is lacking and knowing that he can’t notice it makes her feel the so-familiar hole in her stomach, that makes her so uncomfortable when people push to touch her robes in reverence.

Bull notices her pass by, takes in the stiff shoulders and the sour face, and doesn’t stop her.

The next morning, they’re gone again. She manages to secure the horses for their Inquisition quickly enough, doing some good in the meantime as well. She also takes part in the races set up by Dennet’s daughter, and it’s the most alive Trevelyan looked ever since they met.

Sera, next to him, whistles. The Herald’s braid came undone in the middle of the race, and she’s not just smiling, but outright laughing whenever a turn is just an inch close to failure. She’s riding without a saddle, just her thighs tensed against the horse’s strong muscles, and her fingers are tangled in its hair. Her face is flushed with excitement – and he has to admit, her behind looks particularly nice like this, in her leather pants, body bent so low.

“Shit, where did you learn to ride like that?” Sera asks, once all courses are cleared, donations to the Inquisition are secured, and Dennet already started his travel to Haven.

“I’d also like to know that,” Jeanna adds, looking both proud and sad at having her courses defeated.

“Home,” Trevelyan answers, though the word seems foreign on her tongue, and _home_ is a place that no longer serves that purpose, that no longer can offer her the comfort or the lessons. “From my family,” she corrects.

Because horse riding is the one thing she learnt directly from her mother, no teacher involved in the process, none of her father’s comments passed on this topic. Since lady Trevelyan was such a good rider herself, there was no real point in having anyone else pass the skill forward, and it remains one of her favourite things in the whole world.

She didn’t imagine she’d feel the thrill of it again; not like this anyway. Back at home, it was merchants and children and dogs she had to bypass on her rides through the city, and she’s raced with all nobles her age for years on most important celebrations. It’s a far-away memory, and yet it was so precious just a few minutes away.

“You looked really good, Boss,” Bull says, and she smiles.

“Race me back to Haven?”

* * *

For her, it’s not really a choice she mulls over. She picks the Templars, despite the Val Royeaux incident, in the memory of her brother, following the tradition of her house, because Cullen would approve, because she’s terrified down to her bones to walk in a negotiation with someone she knows nothing about, and so she chooses the over-familiar instead.

She takes Vivienne, because she would be able to handle the Orlesian nobles, in case things go south. She trusts Varric and all he’s seen, and he’s been in the middle of a Templar Order falling apart once before, so he’d be able to at least point out the signs if it comes to that. And she wants Bull with her, simply because she learnt to rely too much on him in the midst of a battle, because she feels like she can’t lose if he has her back.

Her reasoning is almost like a mantra, like a prayer that you mutter even if you know it won’t become reality, because you want hope to trump reality. And she needs this to go right, so she keeps reassuring herself of her picks.

Their nobles are doing a great job though, throwing jabs and threats with the sweetest voice, hidden behind the politest of words. She is lucky they are on their side, because sometimes phrases tied together can make or undo the destiny of the world, and she feels like this point in history where they’re all at, is one of those. Knight-Templar Barris seems to share that belief.

“Win over the Lord Seeker, and every able-bodied knight will help the Inquisition seal the Breach.”

The Herald sighs. “Wish me luck. I have a feeling the Lord Seeker will take some convincing.”

“We’ve been asked to accept much, after that shameful display in Val Royeaux. Our truth changes on the hour.”

“Hey, that sounds familiar,” Varric comments, though Barris has no idea what he is referring to exactly. It’s enough that it makes his own party more apprehensive pushing forward.

The standards rite – she doesn’t want to do it. Already just at the start of it all, and she’s already not succeeding in convincing the Lord Seeker of anything, but asking her to do something that is reserved usually solely to the Templars… It seems unfair and wrong, and there’s no real point or honour in her doing it.

“The Lord Seeker changed everything to meet you. Not the Inquisition – _you._ By name.”

“Why?” That is certainly strange, because there are many stronger and more capable in the ranks of the Inquisition, so to have this much intended focus directly on her makes her uncomfortable.

She still refuses the rite. She knows there’s no correct answer to it anyway, just a display of who she is and what she values. Which is why it feels so necessary that she doesn’t do it, now that she knows how much the Lord Seeker wants her.

Plus, she already knows the order inside her heart, and she hopes she proves it with every choice she makes, this one included.

However, nothing seems to come easy to the Inquisition. Lord Seeker sends his Knight-Captain instead, and he’s certainly unwell. They fight Templars gone mad, which is more difficult than their usual battles, because these are people trained their whole life to fight, going berserk in closed chambers.

“Like no Templars I’ve ever seen,” Varric remarks, one of his arrows hitting one between the eyes, just as he was about to strike down Vivienne – and he falls.

“Is that really important right now?” Bull grunts, taking a hit in place of Trevelyan.

“If it’s weird and I haven’t seen it, that’s worrying.”

She’d rather agree. This is already tiring and they’ve only just gotten started; when all have fallen, Denam is still alive and breathing, and even if he doesn’t deserve the mercy or the correct judgement, he’ll get them anyway. There’s no honour in killing a mad and already defeated man either.

From the notes and letters they find around the castle; these are Red Templars, but worse than Kirkwall’s ever seen, because they’ve been ingesting the stuff. It makes her skin crawl, and for the first time, she is grateful her brother is dead, if only not to see or experience this horror. If only she won’t have to wonder if he’s one of the tainted or one of the questioning ones in the Order.

_Prepare them. Guide them to me._

“Was that the Lord Seeker?” she asks, the voice loud and clear in her ears.

“I haven’t heard anything,” Bull says, and he looks at her somewhat weirdly, maybe because he hates demons, maybe because he thinks she went insane too.

She stops in the middle of the hallway, shivering and trembling, unable to make herself move forward.

_Show me what you are. I would know you._

She doesn’t ask this time around, already knows that whatever she’s hearing, she’s the only one hearing it. She wants to ask Vivienne about it, because she would recognize whatever magic’s at play. She wants to hear Varric mocking her over it. She wants to have Bull push gently at her back to get her moving again… But she’s afraid, too afraid that maybe this is really nothing but her mind playing tricks on her.

Fear catching up with her sense. She takes a deep breath, starts running ahead. Forcing her sense to follow her through. And then the Lord Seeker – no, the Envy demon – touches her.

She feels violated in ways she didn’t know were possible, her mind the playground of somebody else, her body sluggish. Her nightmares made real, walking around burning bodies once again, the worst part of her life relived over and over again, with each step.

She knows it doesn’t make any sense, she knows it’s not real. And she tries to stay brave, out of spite if not anything else, yet she can’t stop the shiver running down the spine when, in her mind, Cullen falls dead to the floor.

_Do you know what the Inquisition can become? You’ll see._

Images fall and rise before her. The worst one of all is seeing her own face, but hearing a demon’s voice out of its mouth.

_Tell me what you think. Tell me what you feel. Tell me what you feel. Tell me what you see._

She dies, betrayed and betraying. She kills, glorious and ruthless and merciless. The Inquisition’s reach widens, the wars grow, the reputation alone strikes fear. She dies, alone and mad.

A future that she doesn’t want, that she knows she doesn’t want – and yet one which is building up right inside her own mind and she’s helpless and can do nothing to stop it. She must see her own body fall, she must hear her own friends and companions throw insults at her, at a version of herself that she tries, hard and painfully, not to become. In her mind, just one word, **no** , repeated over and over again, like it makes any difference when the fade slips so close to her, when everything around her is seeped green.

Then, another voice, softer this time around.

“Envy is hurting you. Mirrors on mirrors on memories. A face it can feel but not fake. I want to help. You, not Envy.”

She almost sobbed and crashed when the demon conjured the face of her brother, by her side, two rulers like they were supposed to be from the dawn of time, ever since they were born. But if this was truly something that was meant to be, it wouldn’t have hurt so much to see it.

She trusts Cole because his is the only face that doesn’t pain her, that doesn’t seem to exist to torment her, or to get some truth out of her.

“All right, Cole. If you really want to help, how do I get out?”

“It’s your head. I hoped you’d know how to stop it.”

If she knew her own mind and her own feelings so well, maybe she wouldn’t have been here in the first place. But her head never looked like the wasteland Envy shows her, so it’s all just as new and foreign for her, as it is for Cole. This is not where she belongs anymore, but rather a demon’s playground.

She only has to move forward, that’s easy enough. That’s what she’s been doing for days and weeks, maybe even more, maybe from the very beginning, as a lady in a land that seems too far-away. It doesn’t make it any easier to see all those familiar faces paired with all those terrible words, doomed images.

_You will bring blood and ruin and fear!_

She does, gods, she does already, doesn’t she, even as the Herald?

“Unless you don’t. You don’t have to. None of this is real unless you let it be,” Cole says, voice close and near, even if his body is not – and she is instantly comforted, less disturbed at what Envy is showing her. She can guard herself better, with more ease, knowing that she is not all alone, knowing that there’s someone (something?) rebuffing all her doubts.

And with each step, the demon’s scenarios seem to make less sense, warped by its own ambitions and seemingly not at all connected with what Trevelyan actually wants. She’s not so afraid anymore, even when guards seal the fates of her advisors, seemingly at her own words – because she trusts the world more than believing it would fall in the hands of a tyrant.

And just because Envy would take her form, that doesn’t mean other demons would just follow its lead – and Orlais means nothing to her, or her forces, their purposes.

“You’re letting the Herald see more to sketch her shapes, but what she sees makes her stronger.”

Does it? It makes her believe less, which might actually be the same thing. Still, walking through a battlefield, in her own mind, followed by the shadows of demons, is the most unnerving thing she’s experienced, and she survived the Conclave. It’s an eerie feeling, like she’s not that much connected to the real world anymore.

“You’re making it hard for Envy to think. It’ll probably come out soon. It’s angry. But that’s okay. So are you.”

Weird, until Cole said it, she didn’t really realize that’s what she was feeling in the first place. But now that she has a word for it, yes, _anger_ it is. She rolls the word around her thoughts, wills it her – as she pushes forward. She’s angry that she has to live through so many scenarios, tired of death and of intrigues. She’s angry that she is in the situation in the first place, because she for sure as hell didn’t agree to a fucking demon slipping inside her head, fucking her up even more.

She embraces the burning rage in her heart, she claims it as hers, the only thing she can have and keep from this whole mess. She nurtures it, with each figure she kills, and she’s heaving with it as she faces the demonic version of herself.

She’s angry even as she’s getting chocked, angry even as the demon promises more pain this time.

“What could you gain from being me?”

It’s the one question that the anger wants the answer to, a _why me?_ hidden in more words, because even in her anger, she cannot comprehend what is so incredible and special about herself, that a demon would go through all of that trying to take over her. And yet she gets only a mocking, and just as little as Envy understands her, she equally as little understands it.

And she’s so fucking tired of this play-pretend inside her mind. She pushes, as hard as she can, against this fake, cheap version of herself.

“Get out of-!”

Her voice is loud – and she comes back to herself, just a breath away from the moment when that hand touched her skin, though she feels several years older and weaker on her feet than before. Bull’s hand at her back grounds her back to this, as she explains what’s been going on.

She’s still so upset, unjustly dragged in this mess as she’s already doing her best to stop the holes in the sky – and everything about her own body and thoughts feels foreign. She doesn’t feel safe inside her own skin anymore. She whimpers a bit, just the lowest of sounds, when they’re made to fight some more.

“Are you good?” Bull asks.

She just shakes her head, but says nothing; unsheathes her daggers instead, as she plans to do exactly what Ser Barris asked her to: show no mercy.

Something inside her snapped while stuck in there with a demon and the dark visions of a future. She fights like she’s fulfilling a personal revenge, calculated and cold and leaving nothing standing between her and her purpose.

_I touched so much of you. But you are selfish with your glory. Now I’m no one._

She’s selfish only with herself. If she is to be a figure of so many people, then she wants to belong to herself too. Killing the Envy demon could not come sooner. And just because one threat is gone, doesn’t mean there aren’t many, bigger ones to come.

Trevelyan, the Herald of Andraste looks up at the sky, pats the pocket at her breast, knowing it to contain the note about the assassination of the Empress, and decides to call the Templars her allies. If the Inquisition is to close the Breach, then it needs willing people helping them out, risking their lives for the cause. There’s no point in shaming them for their failure, when it was so close to being hers as well.

“If Templars still stand against ruinous magic, this is the moment to fulfil your pledge.”

Were her brother still alive, he would be here next to her, fighting for the same cause. She wants to believe that, from wherever his spirit is now, he is proud of his little sister.

* * *

Her advisors though are not as pleased with her, or her choice. They’re all raising their voices around her, and she hasn’t even been allowed to wash away the grim from the fight and the road back, immediately pulled into the council room by Leliana. Her head hurts and she doesn’t even have it in her to defend herself in front of them. Defeated, she sighs.

“We still need to prepare for them. Regular lyrium.”

For a second, she thinks she’s back inside her mind, haunted by something from before, remains of a demon tied to her head forever. But no, everyone else can also see Cole – and her advisors are back to screaming and fighting again.

Cole’s voice is like cold, soothing water over her aches.

“You help people. You made them safe when they would have died. I want to do that. I can help.”

Trevelyan knows that – he has helped her back at Therinfal Redoubt, help without which she would not have been able to fight off Envy. And he has made her feel safe in the midst of her most terrible nightmares, and she breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that he’s next to her, again.

She wants him here; she knows that with a certainty that she doesn’t always possess. And she’s ready to fight everyone to keep him. She can’t even explain her reasoning, but if Cole was really a monster wanting to hurt the Inquisition, he already had several opportunities to do so.

“Cole saved my life in Therinfal. I couldn’t have defeated Envy without him.”

She remembers how lost she’s felt, when she asked about him after coming back to her own time and place, and yet no one was able to tell her anything. She’s relieved to see him, even if for such a short time. And Cole remains, on their side. Her side, first, she believes, but it’s better than not having him at all.

* * *

First thing she does after the council is check on her people. Well, actually, first she takes a bath and changes her clothes, and only then does she start moving around Haven – questioning, needing the support she didn’t seem to get from her advisors.

Josephine grabs her aside first, to ask about her holiness. She can’t escape it even in the middle of what she is supposed to consider her own home, and she is already tired of it. Cole talks in riddles that she barely understands, scratching at deep thoughts and buried feelings and her skin tingles whenever in his presence, yet his lack of filter is what consoles her most in him. There’s no hiding near Cole, and she wants to drop to the ground with the relief of not having to pretend anymore, not having to hold her back straight anymore. Hell, Cole walked through her mind and came back wanting to help her. It makes her feel worthy of what she is.

Vivienne is the one that understands her reasoning: with the Fade broken and so thin, the obvious choice is to rely on Templars to put some resemblance of order back together. They’re already walking towards a future that no Envy managed to envision, and she’s not sure how many destinies she’s forging with her choices, but it’s good that she has people disapproving and agreeing with her both, because it helps from going insane.

Cullen’s training the Templars, to the best of his abilities, and even if he doesn’t agree with Cole being here, Trevelyan won’t forget that one of the few people the spirit praised was the commander. Cullen’s a better man than most, and if he can somehow lead by example, spark the flame of change in the others, it’s more than she could hope for.

Cassandra deals with everything, continuously. That’s why she likes her so much, because they fulfil pretty much the same role, even if their battlefields tend to be quite a bit different. In time, the Templars will learn to come to terms with the idea that mages are just people, and too many of the Inquisition’s people owe their lives to magic and those wielding it.

“Still, I don’t disapprove. In fact, you did well. You made a decision when it needed to be made,” Cassandra says, looking earnestly at the Herald, like she didn’t just finish arguing over this exact topic just an hour before.

She likes Cassandra. She wishes she would have her determination and her power, both of spirit and body.

“Is that all it takes?”

“Most of the time, yes.”

That’s a depressing thought, hopeful too.

Varric’s been there with her, he knows exactly the kind of shit that they had to deal with out there. The Elder One seemed to take everyone’s worst nightmares and creating something even worse, and somehow their small organization is the one thing standing against his plans. It’s the kind of responsibility and weight that makes it impossible for her to rest properly at night, that brings waves of guilt whenever she’s not in the midst of doing something for someone else.

“Maybe you should relax while you can,” Varric says, passing her a cup of cider. “Things should be calm around here for at least the next hour. Take a moment to enjoy it. If the world’s about to end, I’m sure the Seeker will let us know.”

She laughs at his last sentence, and thanks him. Varric is, after all, a magician in his own sense, and words are his best weapon – and he’s incredibly charming and comforting. She sits next to him, sharing his alcohol and feels better than she’s done the whole entire day. He fills her cup again, over and over again, as they share stories of anything else but red lyrium and battles and the future.

She finds Solas next, when she finds the courage to get up and seek him out, so she leans on the walls of his hut, looks up at the sky, where alongside the dying sun, the gap of the breach is also glowing. Sometimes, the colour is so bright that through her window, she cannot tell if it’s day or night.

“Solas?” she tries, and her voice sounds unsure, but her purpose is nothing like it. She has seen the future, and the future is bleak and terrible and she wants nothing to do with it, but the future is not set in stone just yet.

“Yes, Herald?”

He’s always polite. He never chides her when she recklessly throws herself into a battle, or uses up too much of her energy on closing up a rift, just silently passing her a potion, reaching out with his healing magic. She never thought she’d become familiar so fast with something that she was supposed to fear, but especially Solas’ has become her pillar in a battle as much as Varric’s arrows or Bull’s axe. He’s not upset even as she picked the Templars, even as she brought mage-hunters in the same camp as him. She gulps, thoughts stumbling together in her head – and she feels more in control, drunk and unsure on her feet, than she was just a few hours ago, sober.

“Will it kill me? Closing the Breach, I mean.”

“I am afraid that’s an answer we can know only when it’ll happen. It shouldn’t, but you’re also not a mage, so wielding that much power at once might affect you in ways we simply can’t know, because you’re the first and only one of your kind.”

“That’s… less comforting than I was hoping for.”

She sighs, gathering her jacket closer to her body. She recently followed Cullen’s example and had fur sown on the inside of it, and it warms her up well. It doesn’t stop the chill running up her spine, just from the thought of a timeline in which she’s the one to bring forward an end. Solas is looking at her, alternating between her face and her hand, so she forces herself to smile faintly at him.

“Whatever you saw back in Therinfal, Herald, it hasn’t happened yet, and it says nothing about who you are right now.”

A well-needed reminder. She still has a second drinking session planned in her room later on, part washing away the nightmare, part catching up on years having gone without the comfort of a bottle instead of the dullness of her own thoughts. But she can’t deny she’ll walk towards the tavern with an easier heart.

“Thank you, Solas.”

Bull’s hate towards demons mirrors her own; the disgust and fear and anger too. But she’s drunk, which is why she is fumbling with flirting, asking questions about Seheron and its people – and maybe because she’s drunk, he answers it all and even walks her back to her room afterwards, glaring at any soldier brave enough to look their way.

* * *

The Herald of Andraste closes the Breach – quite easily too, when coupled with the Templar forces. The skies calm and the Inquisition proves that alliances work and forge a better future ahead, or at least work to stop destruction.

But nothing comes easy to Trevelyan. Nothing comes easy to the Inquisition. And just several hours after they close the Breach, Haven is under attack by forces under no banner. Dorian Pavus comes to warn them, and she has no time to mull as to why the name or his face are so familiar, as Cullen’s shouting out orders for the battle.

“Burn all the things you have to burn. Save all the people you have to save, but don’t let them get to us,” he says, the first order he gives her directly.

She mans and fires the trebuchets, and yet whatever time she earns through it all is eaten up by the appearance of a dragon. She tries to help out as many people as she can on her way to the Chantry; asks Bull to smash down walls, sends Cole ahead to aid Minaeve, while she climbs for Segritt, Sera helps Flissa. They fight mages on the way, all the while under the shrieks of a dragon, accompanying each hit of her weapons.

Much of being the Herald is listening to other people argue and fight over what to do. And she knows this Elder One is after her, simply out of ego at having stopped his plans so many times before, but she’s angry at him for existing in the first place, so she has no intention of giving in and dying for him. She cares only about how to stop him.

“Pavus!” she exclaims, just at the same time that the handsome moustached young man claps his hands together and says “Trevelyan!”, in the brief respite that the Chantry brings them.

And then, because Varric is also a dwarf prince from the Free Marches, he clears his throat.

“You can’t throw a nug in a tavern without hitting someone with a bit of Trevelyan in them,” he says from her side, and both her and Dorian snicker at the same time. It’s a funnier saying for those that are not, in fact, having any of the Trevelyan blood in them, but after so long away from their respective families, the two of them find it extremely funny to have found a far-away relative in the midst of an international crisis of gigantic proportions.

He grins and she smiles. The laughter, almost idiotically given the situation, almost bursts out of her, at this simple display of normalcy. According to the records that the noble houses keep on these kind of things, they’re some type of cousins so far removed that it’d be almost forgotten, if each of their houses wouldn’t like boasting the connection so much whenever the other one would achieve something.

“You are the Herald of Andraste?”

“Well, I believe I am a bit more apt than back when I was five, yeah.”

“Then, don’t suppose you want to die so young, no?”

Surprisingly, Roderick proves himself useful. There is a way out; maybe not for her, but for those who survived until now.

“If you are meant for this, if the Inquisition is meant for this, I will pray for you.”

She fears she’ll need more than his prayers to survive this time around. And she feels sorrier for her party, that she forces out there with her instead of allowing them a head start at retreat like the rest. But she can’t do this alone.

“I’m sorry,” she says – chocked and afraid. Cole grabs her hand, squeezes hard. She squeezes back.

“Oh, come on. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to get an asshole’s attention,” Varric says, readying his bow.

* * *

She might know less than the Elder One, but she knows and understands more than at the start of this battle. And yet, her last breath, as she falls through cracks, boulders and stone and fire following her, is a sigh of relief.

She wants to cry when she wakes, despite it all. Her head is spinning and her entire body aches. One of her thighs has a spike run through, and her ribs are at least bruised, if not outright broken, because breathing _hurts_. She wonders if she should lay here until the cold or a wild animal takes her, until life runs out of her body.

It’ll take the Inquisition’s forces probably days to return here safely and scavenge for bodies and survivors, and by then she’ll be dead for sure. It wouldn’t be so bad, to die just like this: a sacrifice done after a great win, balancing out the happiness with pain.

But slowly, she starts moving. She drags at the spike in her body, ripping her shirt apart to tie the material around her wound, though it immediately turns red with her blood. She feels lightheaded, her heart pumping faintly at her wrists, at the sight, her stomach churning finally realizing that she is _bleeding out_. Panic surges in her throat.

She shouts, the sound echoing around the tunnels, a frustrated, wounded wail, more animal than human. She doesn’t want to keep moving, she doesn’t want to find her way out of here, but she’s buried under rubble and stone and if she’s not getting out, then nobody’ll get in.

And fuck, she wants to live. She doesn’t want to end it here, when she’s done so little of the things she wanted to. She doesn’t want to just die, after decades of biting her tongue and nodding her head. She promised stories to Dorian, a sparring session to Cassandra. She promised herself a new dress and she promised Sera a picnic. She wants the normalcy too, not just the religion or the red lyrium or the cold nights.

She wants to be: more of herself, on more of this world. There are tears running down her face now, sad and desperate, and even if her entire body flares with pain, she starts walking. She’s angry at her fate, for making her go through all of this. She’s angry at herself, for not surviving better.

When she drops out in the snow, she sinks in it up to her knees. The wind howls all around her, carrying the sound of wolves too. Even she can feel the smell of iron coming from her wound, and there’s no doubt the scent will be picked up soon enough. She tries to hurry, though her entire body shivers and she pants with each movement of her legs. She leaves big, dark marks behind her in the snow.

She finds embers, and she believes they’re recent, warm to the touch, though she can’t be sure. There’s sweat on her forehead and she’s started seeing double, fever taking over her body in the cold and she can’t even feel the pain anymore, overwritten by the freezing of her limbs.

The lights at the horizon must be a mirage, then. Just like a man in the dessert sees the oasis of water, a dying woman in a snow storm sees the comfort of fire. She collapses in the snow, face forward.

* * *

Bull sits somewhat on the side, sharpening his axe, the blood caking on his arms. Krem has the self-preservation not to bother him, even as he positively seems the image of calm and peace. They’ve been helping the refugees evacuate and settle, find each other between the aftermath of that chaos, tending to the wounded, helping carry those left behind, identifying the bodies they could still reach from this side of the mountain, people fallen on the way, from their wounds, exhaustion or famish.

But now, with the fight dying down, the stone settling into its new place, there’s an eerie silence all across the valley, and between the members of the Inquisition. In the midst of their duties, they all seem to sneak glances at the hills of the mountain, looking for someone to prove something to them. It’s unnerving not to have the glow of the Breach above them, too.

Iron Bull throws his tools to the side, sheathing his axe.

“This is ridiculous. We have to go after her.”

And just like that, it’s like the spell is broken; Cullen is shouting for volunteer scouts, Cassandra getting up in an instant and coming by his side. Solas’ magic flares for a brief second at his fingertips, his eyes lost in the sky, where there’s no more gap, no brilliant colour. They put together a group of a couple healers too, and with Cullen opening up their party, they start scouting for Trevelyan.

Or her body, though he doesn’t accept this idea.

* * *

It’s a bit impressive how far she’s come, considering they find her quite close to their camp. It’s Cullen’s voice that raises a cry out of everyone else, and yet no one knows how to properly approach her. Bull shoves forward.

She’s delirious, limbs bent and broken in angles that he doesn’t want to remember a human body can turn to and there’s puddle of blood beneath her body. But, behind her whispered pleas – a prayer. He can’t feel the pity and relief, that at her darkest moments, she still turns to her best known comfort, but she’s still breathing and that’s all that matters. If she’s still alive, that means she can still make it. A potion is shoved down her throat by Cassandra, his hands shake too much to hold it steady against her lips, and she’s not powerful enough to strain against it, even as he imagines it burns against her throat and lungs.

When he picks her up, she screams and shrieks, struggling against his hold even as it makes the pain more blinding, even as her energy deflates with each push against his muscles, even as fresh blood surges from her cuts, even as tears form at the corner of her eyes. It’s instinctual, because in her haze, she cannot make out who he is, or what is happening, the edge of her dreams and reality too blurred, her memories brought forward in her mind, the actual present just a distant figment of her imagination.

Iron Bull knows to recognize the state and not take it personal. There’s a soft, blue glow around her body, as magic pulls together what’s been broken, soothing what’s unbearable. Her cries turn to whimpers, her forehead creasing in pain.

She’s not one for being carried, despite her background. She mutters her brother’s name in Bull’s chest, reverence and despair mingled in one single breath, and she cannot feel the cold of the falling snow, and she cannot see the darkness around the bright lamp that a scout is holding – but wherever her mind is stuck in, she’s just a girl in her teens, picked up by her devious brother to be dunked fully clothed in the water basin in the stables.

“Come on, Boss, you can’t die over this,” he says, hurries his steps, throws ugly stares at the mages accompanying them, their healing magic clearly not working fast enough, as she’s edging between feverish mutterings and unconsciousness. “You are meaner than this.”

_Boss?_ she thinks at the back of her mind, and her memory dissipates, the world re-centres itself around the sound of his voice, around the strangeness of that single nickname in the picture that her brain is trying to have her stuck in. Then, slowly, things start making sense again: the familiar smell of leather, her armour and his strap both, the aching hurt in her hand where her mark still rests, the throbbing pain of her entire body, the taste of iron in her mouth and her unfocused vision, the silent reverence of her companions as she drifts away in and out of consciousness.

She’s muttering nonsense now, fractured names, begging, promises. He hushes her, softly and kindly, unlike she has ever known him, but once aware of her surroundings, she’ll believe it a figment of her imagination too, and not the comfort that it is, at her lowest.

He doesn’t really want to let her go, but the mages are quick in ushering him away once she’s set on a makeshift bed, knife cutting away at her shirt, magic strong in the air all around her body. She cries out in her sleep, struggles against the hands keeping her still at her shoulder – and he can tell the hold is not gentle.

Bull settles just a distance away, leaning on a tent pillar, closing his eyes, seemingly asleep. But he’s aware of the sounds around him, as Trevelyan slowly succumbs to sleep, as the mages finish their job on her, as Mother Giselle takes a sit next to her, as the advisors start arguing.

To wake to their uncertainty and their screams, after all she’s been through; he can’t imagine it’s the most welcoming of sights. They are all tired and defeated.

She wants to take back the good opinion she had on Mother Giselle. She makes mistakes, more often than she’d like to admit, and to rely on this old woman was simply one of them. Because now, as her entire body aches, skin dyed in purple, green and yellow, where her insides have been put back together again through magic not strong enough to leave her without the marks or the pain, the last thing she wants to even think about is how holy she might seem in the eyes of others.

Trying to recover after dying, again, she feels like nothing but one lucky bastard.

“Mother Giselle, I just don’t see how what I believe matters. Lies or not, Corypheus is a real, physical threat. We can’t match that with hope alone.”

And their army has been blown to pieces, their fighters have been wounded and their entire organization blown to pieces, all in just one night. A war that ended just as quickly as it began. She can’t believe others can’t seem to grasp how grave and serious the situation is.

“An army needs more than an enemy. It needs a cause.”

Her chest is still heaving, on the made-up bed holding up together her battle-worn body, as the people start singing her praise, a chorus of chants and unyielding belief.

For anyone just glancing in her direction, it might look like her wounds are still bothering her, and she’s trying to catch her breathe. Iron Bull, sitting in the darkness behind her, knows that the lady Trevelyan is having a panic attack. He is unwelcome by default, his faith in other things and his life somewhere far-away from the Andraste – but she is unequally unwelcome in the midst of those people, a figure so bright and so great that she’s above humans.

He’s seen her bleeding. In her delirious mutterings, half frozen to death, she was more human than all.

The first choked sob surprises even him – a first crack. And then her breathing quickens more and more, and she can’t catch all that air fast enough. She cries and wails, sound covered by the camp celebrating life, and eventually, wincing, she moves her arm enough so she can bite down on the leather of her armour. Silent, suddenly. Her body keeps shacking, until eventually she calms down.

She never seemed to understand the difference between sacrifice and self-slaughter. Until now, bruised and beaten, unheard and spoken over.

The Iron Bull gets close to her because no one else would. He waited, watching, but the Herald of Andraste remained all alone in her corner, with no one checking up on her beyond the state of her body. And yet, she’s been breaking apart for the better part of an hour, and nobody seems to care.

He sits down next to her bed, and she looks at him, surprised but not afraid. Her eyes red with her tears, her lips turned in an upset pout. She looks so much younger, closer to her actual age, now like this. Slowly, her eyes following his movement all along, he raises his arm, resting his hand on top of her, fingers knotting around her wrist, just above where her Mark rests.

Her breath hitches in her throat, and she stares at his much larger hand, holding hers. Just as slow, she moves her other hand, though wincing with the effort, to hold on to his. She keeps crying, tears silently falling down her cheeks, but she keeps holding on, so that something might feel human in the midst of all around her.

“You could have died, eaten by wolves, frozen to death,” he murmurs, and it’s chiding, but spoken so kindly, so low that it doesn’t feel like it.

He moves, ever closer. His other hand wiping her tears away, tangling in her hair once she calms down.

“We would have come for you.”

He sits there even after she falls asleep, so that she can get a bit of a rest without a soldier or zealot interrupting her. He allows Solas, because he knows she would. Whatever healing potions and spells they used, seems to work, because as she walks away with the elf, she’s already looking healthier than just an hour before.

No one sleeps that night, preparing for the trek through the mountains. All the way, she walks at the front of the people, Solas at her side, showing her the path.

“By attacking the Inquisition, Corypheus has changed it. Changed _you_. There is a place that waits for a force to hold it. There is a place where the Inquisition can build… grow…”

She looks at the horizon, stone growing out of clouds.

Skyhold, the one place that holds the skies. Isn’t the Inquisition doing the same?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, it's been a while! I'm moving next week so life will be hectic- but Dragon Age has been a very familiar and needed grounding for me, which is probably why I churned out this chapter in two evenings. I hope you like it.... I know it's moving slowly, but.... at least it's moving?

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! do let me know your thoughts! i also have a [tumblr](https://pathofcomets.tumblr.com/) where you can reach me, in case you want to.


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